About the Book
Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems features selections from Prunty's five previous books--The Times Between (1982); What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986); Balance as Belief (1989); Run of the House (1993); and Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press--as well as new poems that demonstrate the poet's wide-ranging and sympathetic imagination. Prunty's new work includes moving evocations of childhood ("A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953"), richly detailed poems about ordinary people and situations ("The Downtown Bus"), and even a probing meditation on the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk" ("Annals of Jack"). From reviews of Unarmed and Dangerous: "Frostian stoicism and precise observation of sad American scenes distinguish the poems of Wyatt Prunty, whose careful technique sets him above most of the New Formalist poets who share his tastes."--Publishers Weekly Praise for Unarmed and Dangerous: "Wyatt Prunty's poems give a true sense and picture of American life of the last several decades, especially of life in the South.
People a century hence will be able to look back through the lens of these poems and see what it was to live in our time--to live, that is, in the center of the culture and not at its edges, where the grotesque and bizarre have tended to clutter, especially in the literature of the South. No, these poems are different. They are, you might say, exaltations of the ordinary, if we may understand the ordinary as, after all, one of the great and enduring subjects. I should add that some of the poems are very funny, too."--Donald Justice "Wyatt Prunty takes in more of the world than most poets might encompass in several lifetimes. A poet of surprising depths and remarkably steady power, he is never the least bit predictable. He keeps striving for resonant words with which to capture subtle insights--striving, and triumphantly finding them. Reading his work, we sense a current of strong feeling that wants to explode its banks; we become aware of a 'terrible freedom which kills and loves us like a starving mother.' Unarmed and Dangerous at last affords a clear view of Prunty's high stature in contemporary American poetry."--X. J. Kennedy "Some poets write in a plain style and do it well.
Wyatt Prunty does it even better--with wit, with narrative grace, and with modesty. His poems are wise and compassionate. He is a superb poet."--Mark Strand "Unarmed and Dangerous--five earlier books and a batch of new poems--adds up to a solid body of distinctive work by a poet whose limber imagination straddles the ideal and the ordinary. Wyatt Prunty's latest poems continue his development of a riverine style, a style which expresses both their musing character and the flow of noticings and events. Of these, 'The Downtown Bus' is particularly fine and absorbing, and I am grateful too for the grave comedy of 'A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953.'"--Richard Wilbur "Wyatt Prunty has taken subjects he has considered closely--family affections, aviation, childhood and houses, reverence for elders and irreverence for elders--and made a life-long garland of finely wrought poems. I admire all and have sharp pangs for many. For example--the touch-football players who use the shadow of a barn for their boundaried field--imagine their problem as the sun lowers. Sometimes there's a need for a moral or a meditation; sometimes things speak for themselves.
Prunty has a gift for picking eloquent things."--John Casey "Herein one may find the warmth of domestic subjects and the wit of the metaphysicals, the humor that hides in dailiness and the sorrows of failed aspiring. Wyatt Prunty is clearly a poet for all seasons."--Mona Van Duyn Praise for previous books by Wyatt Prunty: "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 "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 "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 "Wyatt Prunty's poems astonishingly combine dramatic and meditative virtues. A triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion."
--Anthony Hecht "Prunty anchors his powerful imagination in the specifics of ordinary details, suggesting persuasively that the near at hand is as unexplored and full of wonder as the far ends of the universe."--Publishers Weekly "A careful poet who enjoys measured rhythm and rhyme, Prunty haunts a familiar territory in contemporary poetry: the solitary domestic self moving in the circular rhythms of family, memory and nature."--Library Journal "One of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the post-World War II generation."--Southern Review "There is an understated urgency about this poetry, a subtle insistence that we should come both to 'know' and to 'believe' that the quotidian is numinous."--Sewanee Review "A writer who has mastered his craft, this poet can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it."--Memphis Commercial Appeal "Prunty articulates stages of perception we often speed through, ignore, or miss altogether."-- Hudson Review
About the Author :
Wyatt Prunty founded and directs the Sewanee Writers' Conference, founded and edits the Sewanee Writers' Series, and teaches in the English department at the University of the South. He has received residencies and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Brown Foundations. In addition to his books of poetry, he is the author of Fallen from the Symboled World, a discussion of the New Formalism and contemporary poetry, and editor of Sewanee Writers on Writing. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Review :
There are vast expanses of ordinary fabric, bejeweled by moments of existential clarity... Prunty holds everyday experience up to the light in such a way that it seems anything but. He has an exquisite hold on life. -- Melanie Rehak New York Times Book Review A distinct and distinctive voice... best looked at not amongst his peers but in the light of an earlier generation of elegant formalists, from Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, to the less well-known Edgar Bowers and J. V. Cunningham. -- N. S. Thompson Times Literary Supplement Frostian stoicism and precise observation of sad American scenes distinguish the poems of Wyatt Prunty, whose careful technique sets him above most of the New Formalist poets who share his tastes. Publishers Weekly
