Since the Noon Mail Stopped

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