The Big Payback

“What a blow it must be to the Hollins program,” a writer commented to me in 2009, “with Richard Dillard dead from food poisoning.”

“Actually” I replied to this misinformed griever: “I happen to know he’s alive and well, and publishing some wonderful poems about writers who really are dead.” So much for the veracity of the literary-gossip pipeline.

Three years later R. H. W. Dillard is still alive and has published his first book in a decade: a volume of poems that may well constitute the finest of his eleven diverse and original books to date (seven collections of poetry, two novels, a collection of short stories, and two books of criticism). Certainly, both in scope and formal achievement, What Is Owed the Dead is Dillard’s best and most ambitious book of verse, which may come as a surprise to some of his readers, given the remarkable achievement of The Greeting, his new and selected poems (1981).

What Is Owed the Dead consists of fifty-two sixteen-line poems addressed to deceased writers and an epigraph drawn from the novel The Dead Seagull by George Barker, a British writer known nowadays more for his numerous love affairs and the fifteen children he fathered by several different women than for his writing. The last three poems of Dillard’s collection are dedicated to Barker, whom Dillard identifies in the book’s credits as its “driving spirit,” though the majority of poems in the collection take better-known writers as their subject. Readers of the Sewanee Review in particular will delight in finding past contributors among the deceased poets to whom Dillard has something to say: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, James Dickey, William Empson, Philip Larkin, and Allen Tate. Also there are poems focused on more distant writers: Caedmon, Shakespeare, Poe, and Emily Dickinson. Even readers uninterested in Dillard’s poetry will want to investigate the book to see how a favorite writer is summoned and addressed—and perhaps to learn something new about him or her via one or more of the quotations Dillard builds into his poems. One might imagine a lesser, more gimmicky poet using big names for the purpose of wheeling and dealing, and perhaps rendering favors and attacks, but that is clearly neither the aim nor the effect of this book.

Given that the complexity of Dillard’s new collection cannot be satisfactorily expressed in a review of this length, it may be useful to focus on one of its central defining elements—the deployment of quotations. What Is Owed the Dead is a highly experimental work that can appear fragmentary when it combines Dillard’s original verse with quoted entries from his journals and footnoted quotations from other writers, who may or may not be the subject of the poem. As an example consider the following lines from the poem to Dickinson, “Fame”:

“This, and my heart beside,”   dull teacher chalks up / LESBIAN AFFAIR,   SISTER-IN-LAW, COPY,   MEMORIZE FOR / TEST, thus “Wild nights!”   safely codified, tamed, / Railroad gray pre-dawn    (01/11/1960), felt, got,    “certain / Slant of light,” minor   depression, you knew,   Emily.

Bits of Dickinson’s poems, a Dillard journal entry from 1960, and his words create an effect that will depend largely on the reader. Those readers unfamiliar with the works of the poets Dillard addresses will find many of the poems indecipherable, whereas readers who know the works in question will be equipped to appreciate Dillard’s extensive research and fascinating applications of the lives and works of notable dead writers. The most impressive aspect of the book, however, is that the poems themselves are deserving of their subjects. They are neither outsized nor out of place in the mighty company they have chosen for themselves. At first glance Dillard’s work may appear fragmentary and cryptic to some readers, but those who read the entire book will find the poems parts of a whole, timeless in their elusive and allusive marriage of ancient and contemporary...