This is not a "best of mothers and sons stories" anthology. It is a somewhat haphazard collection of stories written by mothers and sons for this compilation. Nowhere is it noted which stories are fiction and which are fact. The reader can get through a whole story which reads like a memoir, only to find out at the very end that it was fiction. Very confusing. The introduction by Jill Morgan is just another sentimental ode to the writer's own sons, giving little clue as to what is contained in the book.

There are a few gems amid the gravel however, including one diamond: Eric Jerome Dickey's "Fish Sammich with Cheese," a true tale about the author as a five-year-old. Taken from his loving foster family by his disturbed biological mother on the pretense of getting a fish "sammich", it is a poignant and brilliantly written story of a brave child's struggle to find his way back home.

The photographs which accompany each story are a nice touch, putting a personal face on the stories. But again, they add to the confusion as to which stories are memoir and which are fiction: are the mother and son pictured the ones that the story is about, or not?

Some of the stories end with an "afterward" from the author and some do not. There are biographical notes on the authors at the back of the book. Overall, there are some good tales in here, but better organization of the material would have made for a much more enjoyable read.

Am I the only poetry lover who thinks that James Dickey is tremendously overrated as a poet? I realize that the standards for judging greatness in poetry are vague and complicated by the lack of any generally agreed upon poetic theory in our day and age, but some poets seem to emerge - either buoyed up by developing a loyal following of readers or held up by academic attention. I have to believe that Dickey is one of those whose prominence was based on academic attention - for whatever reason - and not on on a real readership. I have never known anyone who read poetry to voluntarily turn to Dickey's work when they needed a poetry fix. His poems seem selfconscious, too aware of their images, too quick to use a word because of some association that the average reader could not possibly know. To me, they always seemed in bad faith, as if the 'poet' had developed a personal checklist of what he should include in each of his poems and how he would go about being 'poetic'. Most important, I feel that these poems are bloodless. I don't sense real passion in them.

I can spend pleasant time with Wallace Stevens and with Russell Edson, two poets as different from one another as can be, even when I have no idea what they are saying - because I at least always have the sense they are trying to say something important. With Dickey, I frequently have no idea what he is saying and worse, feel that he doesn't either, beyond the message, 'see, I've written a poem.'

James Dickey, Buckdancer's Choice (Wesleyan, 1965)

Buckdancer's Choice, Dickey's fourth book, should have been the one that catapulted him into the national spotlight. (That didn't happen for another five years, until he released his first novel: Deliverance.) Buckdancer's Choice won Dickey the 1965 National Book Award for poetry, as well as getting him named consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. But, as is usually the way with these things, in the wider world, Dickey remained just as obscure as ever for another half-decade.

There are few nits that can be picked with a book full of stuff as powerful as James Dickey's. Two of the best poems he wrote in his long and illustrious career, "The Fire-Bombing" and "The Fiend," both found their first homes in this slim volume. Both are in the style Dickey invented, presumably nameless, which plays with line breaks by putting them in the middles of lines. (Yes, folks, I know these are called caesurae, but they're not regular, like one would find in Old English poetry; think of it more as a form of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm applied to free verse.) The effect is to get the reader to pause more often than normal, and thus to force the reader to emphasize images in his reflections on the poem than he otherwise normally would:

"He descends.....a medium-sized shadow.....while that one sleeps and turns
In her high bed in loss.....as he goes limb by limb.....quietly down
The trunk with one lighted side...."

("The Fiend")

Coupled with these are, of course, poems written in a more "regular" style, equally as powerful, combining enchantment and revulsion. It was said in Victorian times that the mark of British gentility was to have a copy of one of Tennyson's works prominently displayed in one's home. Were America to value poetry that much, there is little doubt Buckdancer's Choice would be on the short list of books that would mark American gentility in a similar way, or at least a certain type of American gentility. Some of the best American poetry written since (or, perhaps, since long before) World War II. **** ½

I gave up after reading a hundred pages or so. I'm a huge fan of James Dickey. I'd waited for so long for a second book from him and was so disappointed by this. The plot was vague and boring, and it didn't have that wonderful prose which Dickey used in Deliverance.

The one positive I could say about this book is his idea of portraying the blind and sighted versions simultaneously. It didn't work in this. But the 'idea' is to be admired. He always seems to find some way to push the established boundaries of writing.

(He pushes the boundaries again in the last of his novels, 'To The White Sea'. He has no dialogue at all for ninety odd percent of the book. Very successfully, too.)

This was probably the worst book I have ever read. I thought something would "happen", but other than philosophical meanderings of the war and the meaning of life, it was a complete waste of time and energy.

I'm aware that "Alnilam" didn't fare well on the popular market, and that three previous ..... reviewers have given this Dickey novel low ratings. But this novel engrossed me, and it has stayed with me for fourteen years now.
A dear English professor under whom I studied used the metaphor of a pebble in a pond to illustrate how interpreting the "meaning" of a fine literary work is essentially a subjective matter. The author drops a pebble into the center of a pond, as it were, and the ripples which it produces, which radiate out to the edges of the pond, are the meanings which we readers ascribe to his creation.
Thus with "Alnilam," I believe. Dickey's powerful prose and deep symbolisms allow a vast range of responses and interpretations. Mine include a lot of religious themes, although I'm aware that Dickey was a bomber pilot in WWII and thus the aviation references, not only explicit but implicit, may be more concretely referential than I've chosen to interpret them. I'm not particularly religious, but I don't know whether the spiritual metaphors I find in "Alnilam" are my own particular "ripple in the pond" or anything Dickey intended when he dropped his "pebble."
At any rate, this reader found "Alnilam" not only brilliantly written but profoundly moving. I'd give it five stars but for the fact that I can't claim to fully understand this novel on an intellectual or objective level, despite enjoying it and being deeply moved by it. But is intellectual grasp a necessary criterion of good literature? Particularly of the work of a brilliant poet? Being uncertain, I give it four stars.