[The poems in The Strength of Fields] float down overwide pages, contract to a single word or expand across the page, lapse into italics, skip over blank intervals. They are like richly modulated hollers; a sort of rough, American-style bel canto advertising its freedom from the constraints of ordinary language. Dickey's style is so personal, his rhythms so willfully eccentric, that the poems seem to swell up and overflow like that oldest of American art forms, the boast….

"The Strength of Fields" [bristles] … with the muscular, excessive imagery that is Dickey's signature….

One recognizes Dickey's familiar themes: the obligatory World War II poems; the fighter-plane poems; the tonguein-cheek redneck poems; above all, a set piece Dickey does better than anyone else: the dream of grandiose escape….

Dickey is one of few American writers—Norman Mailer is another—whose imagination rides the edge of violence. He is brilliant describing...