Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9310310207
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Several years ago I attended a professional conference which included readings by a number of Southern poets. Paul Zimmer (a Pittsburgh poet, actually, but at that time director of the University of Georgia Press) read two or three of his rough-and- tumble poems about a lovable, blue-collar ne'er-do- well named (appropriately enough) Zimmer. Zimmer the poet and Zimmer the character combined to captivate the audience.
It was a hard act to follow. When the next reader stepped to the podium, the contrast in physical types was matched only by the contrast in poetic tone. The rumpled dynamo Zimmer had yielded the microphone to a tall, diffident young man whose poems were as graceful and elegant in their treatment of the everyday concerns of thoughtful people as the Zimmer poems were outrageous and energetic. That tall, unassuming poet was Wyatt Prunty.
"The Run of the House," Prunty's latest collection, displays the same tonal control as his earlier work, the same sense of craft, the same effort to subject the bewildering uncertainties of our lives to patient, poetic scrutiny. It also contains evidence of a poet squirming to wriggle free of his well-groomed image.
The delicious ironies and reversals of "A Note of Thanks" are characteristic of Prunty's bemused, lighter style. The poem bathes us in the relief that any vacationing couple must feel at the return of a lost wallet. The resemblance to an American Express commercial ends there, however. We (and the couple) have been niftily duped.
"The Wedding Stop," another of my favorites in the collection, is strongly reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's wonderful descant on romantic disillusionment "Living in Sin." The bride in Prunty's poem is honeymooning at a motel a few light years from the Homestead. She awakens to find herself lying next to a bit of a lug. Stepping outside to catch a breath of morning air, the woman encounters a sloppy family tumbling out of a room down the way, lurching onto the road "in their jumbled car, with its smeared windows and fitful engine." Prunty's imagery, in this preview of the bride's life, is perfect; and so is his moral. Faced with reality, we die a little, perhaps, and then retreat back into the dream. A honeymoon is, after all, what you make of it.
I would be sympathetic to the reader who might complain that a steady diet of Prunty's poems could leave one a trifle pale. There is always the danger, with a style so well wrought, of spending considerable time and energy fastidiously dissecting the epidermis while never cutting to the quick. But I would point, in "The Run of the House," to a more daring Prunty who takes on the dark theme of self-doubt in the wake of broken relationships in a risky and rewarding poem entitled "And Only After": "For it's high-ho, and ha, and hee,/ And off with everybody."
Especially in these riskier poems, Wyatt Prunty's angle of vision yields its own special insights: "... traveling the way the light things go, Not ahead but spindrift and sideways of sight, As the imagination does sometimes To get things right ..."
\ Dan Gribbin teaches literature and film at Ferrum College. He is fiction editor of `Artemis.'
by CNB