Since the Noon Mail Stopped: (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

Wyatt Prunty has been called "one of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the post-World War II generation" (William Bedford Clark, 'Southern Review'). In this new collection, his wry humor and meditative spirit attach themselves to such unlikely objects as, for example, the "Zamboni" that polishes a skating rink. (He finds a metaphor in how it "restores a hardened glaze / as cold and clear as any thought we keep.") In "Coach," he portrays a dog's inner life, from puppyhood to death, in four brief stanzas: "All trucks were from Hell and deserved my bite, / all children sheep and not to leave the yard..." "Grown Men at Touch" finds delicious irony in the shadow of a barn, declared the boundary of a football match, that gradually moves the goal line beyond the players' reach: "By four, our shadow-field / Had gone long past the longest pass; / By five, no one could run its length..." What these poems share is that each is a different approach to the book's abiding preoccupation with our mortality. Praise for Wyatt Prunty: "Wyatt Prunty's poems astonishingly combine dramatic and meditative virtues. A triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion."--Anthony Hecht "In poetry this honest you can see the character of the writer pretty clearly. I see, too, a certain fine pride, the pride taken in working carefully to get things right. Here, then, is a poetry both artful and truthful, a pretty rare case."--Donald Justice

About the Author :
Wyatt Prunty is the author of 'Balance as Belief'; 'What Women Know, What Men Believe'; and 'The Times Between'; all published by Johns Hopkins. His other works include a critical study of contemporary poetry, '"Fallen from the Symboled World": Precedents for the New Formalism'.

Review :
"In Wyatt Prunty's poetry, familiar things and places, old things and new things, lost things, lost places are recovered and illuminated by a language both skewed and precise."--Walker Percy "There are many things to appreciate in Wyatt Prunty's 'Balance as Belief', but I take particular pleasure in darkling suburban trees which 'Now shadow up instead of down,' or in a poem which speaks of two kinds of sleep, 'the one deep and generous, the other waiting like a fear born long before its name.' What I am praising here--and might praise also in the supple close of 'Water' and the whole of 'The Starlings'--is the power to produce a haunting lucidity."--Richard Wilbur "Quiet, reflective, and of unexpected depth. His subjects for the most part are domestic...but the lessons he draws from them are large indeed, framed by and set in the wind, the sky, the stars. His diction is plain, but his thoughts are not."--Howard Nemerov