Wyatt Prunty's poems have been described as "quiet, reflective, and of
unexpected depth" (Howard Nemerov), "both artful and truthful" (Donald
Justice), "a triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion"
(Anthony Hecht), and "illuminated by a language both skewed and precise"
(Walker Percy). As a poet, Prunty--who is also the founder and director
of the Sewanee Writers' Conference--has been praised for "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) and called "one
of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the
post-World War II generation" (Southern Review).
An elegant overview of his career until now, Unarmed and DANGEROUS: New
and Selected Poems features selections from Wyatt 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"). Together, the
poems gathered in this volume afford a clear portrait of a major
American poet whose distinctive voice and vision have earned him the
admiration and respect of such contemporaries as Richard Wilbur, X. J.
Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered
his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for
granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it" (The
Commercial Appeal).
