Jericho: The South Beheld

Dust jacket notes: "In this unique, mysterious and beautiful book, two Southerners turn their talents on their land and their people. One is a painter and the other is a poet. The painter, Hubert Shuptrine, and the poet, James Dickey, each went his own way into the South, Shuptrine visually a d Dickey by a strange verbal process of his own. No attempt is made to have the paintings and text coincide. The paintings should be looked at for themselves and the prose passages should be read for themselves. The purpose was to capture the South from the standpoint of two artists an deeply sentient human beings, and to record in a big book what both experienced, independently and yet with a kinship that can come only from gifted men in a kind of creative brotherhood. Shuptrine's images will enter into the consciousness of the viewer very quickly and will stay. Dickey's prose-poems will do the same from a different angle. He asks nothing more or less than that the reader become pure spirit. He endows him with the power to fly, to hover with the hummingbird and slide along the wind with the gull, to circle like a buzzard and swarm like a gnat. He asks the reader - maybe you - to give up your body for the space of reading this book, and to enter into the veer of the land and rivers, to zigzag over the landscape of people, to investigate the trembling of the web of custom and family. For his land, Dickey chooses the emblem of Jericho, the first city of the Promised Land: the city that fell to Joshua. Dickey asks nothing of history, nothing of Biblical accuracy, nothing but what may be given the poet for his needs: first, that there was a Promised Land, and, second, that it was named Jericho. It is the South, in Shuptrine's sensitive paintings and Dickey's strange, perhaps unforgettable, prose. Two artists, then. Two deep views of Jericho, that will not come - or come together - again."