SOURCE: Van Ness, Gordon. “The Children's Poetry.” In Outbelieving Existence: The Measured Motion of James Dickey, pp. 71-74. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992.

In the following essay, Van Ness summarizes the critical reception of Dickey's two volumes of children's poetry.

Dickey's two children's books, Tucky the Hunter (1978) and Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter (1986), have received almost no critical study, perhaps because he has devoted so little published effort in this regard compared to other major twentieth-century poets like Randall Jarrell and Anne Sexton. Reviews are sparse, mostly superficial, and generally mixed. Both books concern the exploits of a family member, the former involving Dickey's grandson, James Bayard Tuckerman Dickey, and the latter, his daughter Bronwen Elaine. In addition, both works mythologize the adventure the protagonist undergoes, a larger-than-life confrontation with real or imagined creatures.

Good children's poetry possesses a singing quality, a melody and motion. If the poem...