Dickey, after the lapse of his later poems,… ventures everything in The Zodiac, a longish poem of some 30 pages loosely based upon a modern Dutch original. Dickey's "drunken and perhaps dying Dutch poet" speaks for Dickey's own will-to-power over language and the universe of sense, a will so monomaniac as to resemble Ahab's, rather than Melville's. The Zodiac is obsessive and perhaps even hysterical verse, and after a number of readings I am helpless to say whether, for me, it works or fails. I cannot say whether Dickey has mastered his own language here or not, but I will have to keep going back to this poem, as will many other readers. It ends as strongly as anything in the Orphic and Promethean demi-god Dickey: "So long as the spirit hurls on space / The star-beasts of intellect and madness." (p. 22)

Harold Bloom, in The New Republic (reprinted by...