In Wyatt Prunty's new collection of poems, people either keep their balance or, doubting it, tip and fall. A small girl struggles to ride her bike among older children already 'stable as little gyros.' Ice-skating with friends, a boy suddenly drops from sight, and drowns. The poet of Paterson stands at the edge of his Jersey waterfall and knows that 'good balance is belief.' Poising and counterpoising themselves in settings at once fixed and erosive, the people in these poems move through 'one long revisionary river that curls back against itself, as if the only way to move ahead was by deflecting back.'

"In Wyatt Prunty's poetry, familiar things and places, old things and new things, lost things, lost faces are recovered and illumined by a language both skewed and precise".--Walker Percy. (Poetry)

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.

This study evaluates figure and form in contemporary poetry, especially the powers of simile and simile-like structures. Examining the works of Nemerov, Wilbur, Bowers, Hecht, Justice, Cunningham, Bishop, Van Duyn, Hollander, Pack, Kennedy, Ammons, Creeley, and Wright, Prunty argues that doubts about language, the tradition, and theistic assumptions embedded in the tradition have made simile and various simile-like arrangements into major modes of thought. From Lowell's early interest in the "similitudo" and the "phantasm" of Gilson, to Husserl's "phantasies" and Heidegger's interest in similitude, to the use made by contemporary poets of simile, he shows that metaphor--together with slippage, mimicry, synaphea, conjunctions, anacoluthon, chiasmus, and other simile-like patternings--have proven to be more trustworthy than symbol and allegory. Throughout the study, Prunty demonstrates that as uncertainty about language has changed from a predicament of mind to a new way of thinking, simile and simile-like occurrences have provided poetry with variational thought and constitutive power.

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").

Howard Nemerov-Poet Laureate of the United States, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets-was one of the most prolific and significant American poets of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1991, he had published fourteen collections of poetry. Judiciously selected and introduced by poet Daniel Anderson, The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov represents the broad spectrum of Nemerov's virtues as a poet-his intellige nce, his wit, his compassion, and his irreverence. It stands as the retrospective collection of the best of what Nemerov left behind, which is some of the finest poetry that the twentieth century produced. "To keep his errors down to a minimum," W. H. Auden wrote, "the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon a nd even, perhaps, hated by all others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish." Such are the readers to whom the poetry of Howard Nemerov might appeal. He distinguished himself on the landscape of American letters as a writer of great versatility. More than a decade after his death, that claim still holds true. In this, the only edition of Nemerov's work that surveys his entire poetic output, first-time readers of these poems will find an introduction to a truly remarkable creative mind. Longtime admirers of Nemerov will be reminded once again of his significance as a craftsman and philosopher, and as a poetic steward of the many ways in which we experience the world.

Every summer for the past thirty years, the Sewanee Writers' Conference has gathered a community of writers for two weeks of workshops, readings, talks, and meetings focused on the craft and art of writing. This book is a selection of craft talks delivered during the conference over the last several years. Some essays focus on one or two authors, some focus on texts, while others cast their regard more broadly. All are written in response to questions generated by the process of writing, as masters of the craft candidly report challenges they confront and the means by which they work to resolve such issues. The eighteen essays encompass poetry, fiction, and playwriting, investigating questions of language, character, design, and meaning, with nuanced readings of particular authors and works alongside more wide-ranging reflections on craft. Designed for audiences of writers and readers across multiple levels and backgrounds, the essays collected in As We Were Saying offer original, insightful arguments about the craft of writing and the power of literature.

For two weeks every year, literary figures from throughout the country gather in rural Sewanee, Tennessee, to lead the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a series of workshops and colloquia aimed at cultivating the craft of writing. Gleaned from the first ten conferences, the "craft" lectures collected in Sewanee Writers on Writing offer a range of perspectives on writing as practiced by various playwrights, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts have made the Sewanee conference a mecca for developing talent.

The essays offer a banquet of topics that will whet the appetite of all authors, professional and amateur. Russell Banks ponders the role of research in the constitutive power of the imagination, John Casey considers simultaneity in art, and Ellen Douglas describes how a writer confronts the changing shape of memory. Horton Foote offers his perspective on the collaborative spirit of the theater, and Ernest Gaines explains why his subject matter must always remain the people of Louisiana. Anthony Hecht responds to W. H. Auden, revealing the ways both poets pair talent with subject, and John Hollander explores the delicate subtleties of Robert Frost's figurative thought.

Diane Johnson offers a witty and frank answer to the question all writers face at one time or another: "Write what?" Donald Justice expounds on the virtues of obscurity in poetry, and Romulus Linney offers practical guidelines for using dramatic action to revise a play. In her examination of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, Alice McDermott demonstrates that fiction writers are bound by no rules other than "do whatever you can get away with". Marsha Norman provides a witty list of the dos and don'ts playwriting, and FrancineProse stresses the importance of detail to a story's credibility. Finally, volume editor Wyatt Prunty discusses the figure of vacancy in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Peter Taylor.

Together, these wise and wised-up essays offers a treasure trove of insight on the art of writing. Creative writers and scholars alike will benefit from the enthusiastic support and astute advice of these masters of the written word.

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").