SOURCE: A review of The Eagle's Mile, in World Literature Today, Summer, 1991, p. 489.

[In the following review, Pratt discusses the language in The Eagle's Mile.]

Having long ago charted his place as a leading American poet of flight, James Dickey makes flight the central theme of his latest collection of poems. He borrows his title from a line of William Blake, "The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's Mile," and like Blake he mixes the visionary with the actual, sometimes mounting on the powerful wings of eagles, sometimes on the delicate wings of butterflies, letting his imagination soar into space or, at other times, calling back images of aerial gunnery in the Pacific, from his service as a night-fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War. There is no poem in The Eagle's Mile as sensational as his earlier famous "Falling," which combines the exhilaration of flying, the erotic...