The eye-beaters, blood, victory, madness, buckhead, and mercy

I love poets from the American South. There is a sensuality and feeling-first ethic that make them distinctive. The book opens with the sad and lovely "Diabetes," which describes its initial and eventual symptoms: "I thirsted like a prince...my belly going round and round with self-/ Made night-water..gangrene and kidney/ Failure...boils blindness skin trouble falling/ Teeth coma and death."Knowing a diabetic personally makes this melancholic meditation highly poignant for me: "One pocket nailed with needles and injections, the other dragging/ With sugar cubes to balance me in life...Tell me, black riders, does this do any good?"The poem's diabetic is courting death, "a livable death at last": "Heavy summer is right/ For a long drink of beer (a diabetic no- no)...my body is turning, is flashing unbalanced/ Sweetness everywhere, and I am calling my birds.""Messages" contrasts the childhood and adolescence of the poet's son. In childhood, father and son chase "Butterflies"; all is playful frivolity. In the gorgeous "Giving a Son to the Sea," Section II of this poem, Dickey realizes he will lose his son to other loves and other lands: "And I must let you go, out of your gentle/ Childhood into your own man suspended..." It oozes fatherly affection as the poet addresses his "gentle blonde/ Son.""Apollo" honors American astronauts but sees Dickey going a bit over the top verbally, something he is perpetual danger of doing. On the other hand, his abstract mysterious work in "The Place" is stunning: On a frigid winter night, a pair of lovers look for a place private enough to share a secret."The Cancer Match" brings bracing optimism to a troubling diagnosis, and "Venom" brings the same message to a snakebite sufferer. This pair of poems are like a Southern faith-healing; they ask sheer belief and willfulness to conquer death: "Turn the poison/ Round turn it back on itself O turn it/ Good: better than life they whisper:/ Turn it, they hammer whitely:/ Turn it, turn it,/ Brother.""Blood" is about the murder of a woman, and the reader can't be sure if the poet is the killer or someone who stumbled upon the scene. I recommend it for its beautiful violence and its mystery. "In the Pocket" is a witty ode to a football quarterback; it's great to see Dickey take on unlikely poetic topics. It contains the great lines "My friends are crumbling/ Around me the wrong color is looming," as the QB scrambles for safety. "Madness" is a masterpiece about a beloved family dog dying because it coupled with a rabid she-wolf. A chilling study of a canine femme fatale which has a subtext about human adultery, the poem suggests a conflict between the longing for freedom and domesticity. This is a sensual tour-de-force, perhaps the volume's best poem. The rabid she-wolf is "slopping soap." "She burned alive/ In her smell." She taunts the dog, claiming, "I'm what you come/ Out here in the bushes for." The beloved pet, the "spirit of the household" is welco