Betty Adcock: Imperfect Wonders: A Look at Some Poems by James Dickey (January 2004)

Betty Adcock explores themes of death, survival, and guilt in the work of James Dickey, tracing these themes to biographical circumstances but arguing, too, that the poems should be considered in their own right.  Adcock focuses on poems Dickey wrote before 1967, including “The Driver,” “The Lifeguard,” “Scarred Girl,” “Chenille,” “Reincarnation 1,” and “A Screened Porch in the Country,” considering how the sense of the mystical in them is rooted in the immediate and real.