Many readers who do not know James Dickey the poet are very familiar with James Dickey the novelist. Published in 1970, Deliverance became a bestseller and was turned into a full-length feature film in 1973. Dickey himself played a backwoods southern sheriff in the movie.

In 1999, A. J. Conyers published The Eclipse of Heaven: The Loss of Transcendence and Its Effect on Modern Life. In this book, Conyers argues that people in the modern world have lost a belief in the power of transcending mortality and, as a result, have only a depressing, shallow view of life and death.

Robert Kirschten's Approaching Prayer: Ritual and the Shape of Myth in A. R. Ammons and James Dickey (published in 1998) is a good look at these two southern poets' use of myth, mysticism, and "word-magic" in their poems. It includes commentary on later collections...