''Buckdancer's Choice'' (1965) is a collection of poems by
James Dickey. It won the U.S.
National Book Award for Poetry["National Book Awards – 1966"]
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-26. (With essay by Patrick Rosal from the Award's 60-year anniversary blog.) in 1966 and the
Melville Cane Award from the
Poetry Society of America.
The opening poem, "The Firebombing," relates a
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
pilot's memory of a night air raid on
Beppu
is a city in Ōita Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Japan. As of March 31, 2017, the city had a population of 122,643 , Japan. ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' reviewer Joseph Bennett called it "one of the most important long poems written postwar."
In the poem "Buckdancer's Choice," the narrator listens as his mother, dying of
emphysema in an adjacent room, whistles an old fiddle tune. The poem first appeared in ''
The New Yorker'' for June 19, 1965, alongside "
Hapworth 16, 1924", the last published story by
J. D. Salinger.
References
External links
*Bennett, Joseph
"A Man with a Voice."''New York Times'', February 6, 1966.
1965 poetry books
American poetry collections
National Book Award for Poetry winning works
Wesleyan University Press books
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