In Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise, Wyatt Prunty ushers readers into
a seesaw world, one that teeters between small fables of childish
misgivings and adult assurances. Alternately shadowed and
illuminated by nostalgia, this deft, witty volume brings together
seventeen of Prunty's recent poems, seven of which have been
previously published in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, the Kenyon
Review, and Blackbird. In "Crescent Theater, Schenectady, NY," a
silent-movie accompanist reads his foreign newspaper after work as
he listens, ever the outsider, "to his children using English / For
everything they wish." In "Rules," a small girl, told she can't go
to the school nurse "every time some bad thing happens,"
plaintively wonders, "Where do you go?" And in "Making
Frankenstein," a boy who has cajoled his parents into letting him
see The Curse of Frankenstein wakes to a nightmare. His father bans
horror films as "too anatomical"; "What's anatomical?" the boy
wonders. Given a book that catalogs diseases, the worst of which
come "from intimate contact," he is horrified by his father's
explanation of grownup intimacy: "That's how you made your way into
this world." Moving from a wry portrait of a husband- musing on
mortality - whose Christmas tie lands in the gravy, to "Reading the
Map," which grapples with the cartography of love, to "ad lib," a
farewell that redefines farewell, these poems burnish the small
triumphs and fears that fill our daily lives with humor and pathos.
The book closes with a long, four-part poem, "Nod," which
transports readers to a parking lot in July: an asphalt-as-inferno
where Cain the cracker, or adversary-as-initiator, the pleuritic
voice of disappointment, names the ways inversion makes a lie
reliable and works people best as, like a joke or discount price,
"It makes you feel you're getting more by giving less." Funny, raw,
and colorfully musical, "Nod" plays what teeters, like a tuning
fork.
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