SOURCE: Applewhite, James. “Reflections on Puella.” Southern Review 21, no. 1 (winter 1985): 214-19.

In the following review of Puella, Applewhite admires the diversity and taut clarity of this poetic collection.

In considering the relation between these poems from the point of view of a girl growing into a woman, and those poems of adventurous experience from a masculine point of view which make up the bulk of the poet's work, we should remember that the nature of the speaker, of his or her status in the poem, has always been a crucial issue in the work of James Dickey. Dickey helped resurrect the poetic persona from the crippling self-directed irony of Modernism. His macho stance was not itself a problem except insofar as it may have seemed to make Hemingwayesque claims reaching outside the poems to a base in some grandiosely daring lifestyle. The point lies in how often, from...