A Death Yard of Junk David Havird (bio) James Dickey, Death, and the Day’s Light, edited by Gordon Van Ness. Mercer University Press, 2015, xxxviii + 92 pages. $25. James Dickey died in mid-January 1997. He left unfinished two poems of substantial length about bodybuilding: “Show Us the Sea” and “For Jules Bacon.” They now appear—versions of them—in Death, and the Day’s [End Page 174] Light, together with five of the six poems that Dickey was able to complete after the publication in 1990 of The Eagle’s Mile, his last volume. Previously published in periodicals, the five poems, “Conch,” “The Drift-Spell,” “Last Hours,” “The Confederate Line at Ogeechee Creek,” and “Entering Scott’s Night,” also appear in The Complete Poems of James Dickey (2013); so it is the publication of the two poems about bodybuilding that makes Death, and the Day’s Light exciting for Dickey’s devotees. “Death, and the day’s light” is a phrase in “Show Us the Sea” and in “The Drift-Spell”—a short “out-take,” as Dickey termed it, from the vastly longer poem. The phrase conveys the aging poet’s stoical acceptance of death, in particular the death of his first wife, Maxine, and his own (which he foresees as ever-present), not only at night or in cavities of shade but also, like love, in new daylight. This embrace of “a whole thing” is the thematic imperative of “Show Us the Sea.” “Death, and the Day’s Light” is also the name of the folder in which Dickey, in anticipation of a future book of poems, kept the five reprinted here. Thus the title of this, “James Dickey’s final volume of poems,” as the poet’s son Christopher Dickey calls it in the foreword. Drafts of the bodybuilding poems, “Show Us the Sea” and “For Jules Bacon,” were in a separate folder labeled “Two Poems on the Survival of the Male Body,” the corporate title for the two long poems in Death, and the Day’s Light. “Show Us the Sea” is thirty-two pages long; “For Jules Bacon” is twenty-four. During the Christmas holidays some few weeks before his death, Dickey showed this folder to Christopher. As Christopher describes it in Summer of Deliverance (1998), his memoir of his father, each page of the manuscript therein “was covered with notes and the notes themselves were annotated.” Dickey, who had survived a near-fatal bout of alcoholic hepatitis in 1994 but was then, because of lung disease, unable to breathe without the aid of a machine, doubted that he could ever finish either poem. “You will finish it,” he told his son. But Christopher, though a professional journalist, knew that he was neither a poet nor “a scholar of [his] father’s work,” and when, after his father’s death, he did attempt “to edit, or re-compose” the poems, his “lines on the survival of the male body were stillborn.” Ten years later Gordon Van Ness, a scholar of Dickey’s work (though not himself a poet), proposed “to finish the two poems”; Christopher and his siblings gave him their blessing. (A professor of English at Longwood University, Van Ness is the editor of Dickey’s early notebooks and letters.) According to Van Ness, there are “fifteen identifiable typescript drafts” of “Show Us the Sea” and “eight typescript drafts” of “For Jules Bacon.” By collating these typescripts while “focusing particularly on the last three drafts of each poem and selecting the wording which repeatedly or most often manifests itself,” Van Ness produced the versions of those “Two Poems on the Survival of the Male Body” we see in Death, and the Day’s Light. The manuscripts themselves, as the poet Dave Smith points out in his generously appreciative afterword, show the poet to have been “an over-writer, [End Page 175] a duplicator of lines and phrases to which he slowly added or subtracted” until the poem emerged, as if inevitably from the draft’s “delirium / Of warwaste”—as Dickey memorably describes the army’s junkyard in “For Jules Bacon.” Given Van Ness’s commendably cautious “governing principle”—“Less Van Ness, more Dickey...
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Jul 30, 2022
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