Half of Wyatt Prunty’s ninth volume of poetry consists of “Nod,” a dream-vision narrative set mostly in the darkness of a shopping mall parking lot in Atlanta. Standing there, a man, who refers to himself as Fulton, though “of course there was no Fulton,” finds himself in an age so mired in inanition and meaninglessness, it is like “the flu before the fever touches you, / The ache without a place to point.” He wishes it were otherwise, that a time might return when Hank Aaron was at the plate and “T-bills” meant “what they say.”
But ours is a fallen world. Mulling life’s disappointments, he is accosted by another man, smoking and fedoraed, who emerges from an “old low Mercury” and goes by the name of Floyd. In the car behind him lurk his wife, June, and a thin boy sitting “crookedly.” The conversation that ensues is dreamlike indeed, and meant to remind us of those exchanges between Dante and Virgil in The Commedia where the poet’s brief, naïve words are rebuked by Virgil’s long and wise discourses.
Something is not right, however: Dante is about to be soaked in the atmosphere of the Southern gothic. Floyd seems to know all of Fulton’s memories; indeed, he hears everything “in the white noise of” his air conditioner, and though he seldom smiles, he nods knowingly at everything: One shopping mall is like another, ours is a homogenous age, but Floyd has witnessed all of history, from Odyssean shipwrecks to “Ozian” twisters. Our protagonist refers to Floyd as “my smoke, my cough,” as if the latter were the projected image of some future emphysema death. At one point, the two dispute whether the truth about things is a matter of the “right and fitting” or just a succession of facts to which we afterwards assign cause and effect.
For all the apparent non sequiturs of chatter, we see that this dream is leading Fulton somewhere, to a confrontation with the possibility that a “lie can tell you” something closer to the truth than the truth itself. Floyd promises this, but it is Fulton who proves it by retelling a tale from his childhood where outright misperception reveals a truth. He has caught an owl out of the corner of his eye, but takes it for a ghost, an angel, or, as his sister snidely remarks, “the Phantom,” who is “after you . . . Because you rival him in ugliness.”
Floyd answers with a tale more bizarre: “My daddy threw me out and down,” he says over and over, because he had imitated and mocked him, and “now there is no getting back.” They talk on. When Floyd turns back to get in his car, Fulton sees “Bird wings collapsing from his back.” Is he another phantom, like the owl from his childhood? A projection of a childhood lost, and future death? Or the devil, thrown down from heaven?
All three, probably. The poem is a dream, a story lived while one has nodded off. Floyd nods up and down, as if he knows the history of suffering and what history means. But finally, Nod is the place where Cain went, “east of Eden,” after murdering Abel. Floyd stands in for the damnation of the protagonist’s life, its failings—and also for the fallen world as a whole.
The story about the Phantom that Fulton gives us here Wyatt Prunty has already told elsewhere—in a 1993 autobiographical lyric. So we find the personal recast here as something more fantastical and universal. Floyd may be part of Fulton, but he is also the devil. Fulton may be Wyatt Prunty, but he is not only him, he is a figure of us all. And here we arrive at what makes this latest book a new and significant achievement in Prunty’s work.
In his study of modern poetry, Fallen from the Symboled World (1990), Prunty argues that, while modernist poets such as Yeats and Eliot spoke symbolically in order to reveal the transcendent principles that structure and give depth to the minutia of everyday life, contemporary poets tend to be skeptical and reluctant to claim that they understand much of anything. The meanings they express are “local” rather than universal in scope, and the images they use are not symbols but mere “simile-like tropes.” The contemporary poet draws likenesses but stops shy of claiming that likeness actually reveals anything.
This tendency may suit a skeptical age, but it has never sat well with Wyatt Prunty. His poems over the decades have sought to discover some justification and means for poets “to become good liars” again: to lie in ways that reveal the truth. Nearly all his work is built out of a loose iambic meter, following Eliot’s advice that verse should hint at a permanent order even as it also represents its obscuring within the “futility and anarchy” of historical experience. Many of his poems bear down on memory, trusting the proofs of the past to show us something we can believe. His
narratives often imagine the world through the emotional lives of others, as in early poems such as “The Taking Down” and “The Lake House,” where women carry on through grief at the loss of husbands and sons. Sometimes, of course, Prunty just accepts the “Limited and quirky . . . comforts” of the simile for the good they can offer, as in two of his justly celebrated lyrics, “Learning the Bicycle” and “The Kite.”
The strange vision of “Nod” marks an achievement and a departure. Prunty definitively leaves the humble simile behind for a weird allegory. He lets the certitudes of his personal past become the stuff of a spiritual Everyman tale with a Southern twang. For Prunty, to speak of being “fallen from the symboled world” was once just a figure of speech; but in this new poem, we discover that, for humankind, to be fallen is a metaphor only in the strong sense of the modernists, by which I mean, as G.K. Chesterton once said, it is an empirical fact.
James Matthew Wilson, associate professor of religion and literature at Villanova, is the author, most recently, of Some Permanent Things.
