Speech and Song 

“Poetry,” Robert Graves once wrote, “is more than words musically arranged. It is sense; good sense; penetrating often heart-rending sense.” Based on his ninth collection of poems, The Lover’s Guide to Trapping, Wyatt Prunty would agree. His poems are heart-rendingly sensible in an age that mistakes fashionable nonsense for innovation, and mere wordplay for linguistic spark.

Prunty has, in his own critical writing, identified two types of contemporary poetry that stand as opposites: “plainspoken poems that are reticent about intensity and lyrical poems that are both compulsive and musical,” in other words, speech and song. Speech lends itself to a realist’s description of the fallen world, while song embarks on more visionary flights describing an ideal one.

In the best poems, these two elements work in tandem, essaying the visionary while maintaining firm contact with the rational. Favoring vision leads to airy blather, favoring reason leads to journalism.

On first glance, Prunty’s measured address and homey subjects seem to favor speech. Certainly, there is nothing “visionary” about the subject of the first poem here, a mole tunneling blindly through soft earth:

Myopic master of the possible,
Wise one who understands prudential ground,
Revisionist of all things green;

So when he surfaces, lumplike, bashful,
quizzical as the flashbulb blind who wait
For color to return, he’ll nose our green-
rich air with the imperative poise of now.

The unlovely mole is the poet’s check against sentimental effusion, a tiny realist who knows there can be no eternal spring. But the mole, like the poet, is sly: His realism, the imperative of his “now,” makes the green just a bit greener.

On second glance, however, the poem may be closer to song than speech. Rather than proceeding rationally from one objective observation to the next, the poem leaps from figure to figure with the opulent abandon of symbolist: “myopic master of the possible,” “wise one,” “quizzical as the flashbulb blind,” “our green-rich air.” This is sly, stealthy poetry in which Prunty’s mild-mannered, buttoned-down persona continually reveals the flashing eyes and floating hair of the poet.

Rain and the broadest reaches go under;
Drought, and they are dust. But as always these remain.
To die down to stubble, to disappear,
Then rise from dark into the leaf-long change
Of new life–this carries more than reason
Gathers in its mirrors, as being fertile
After freezing cold or swallowing flood
Bears more than powers now to plant.

The poem carries more reason than can gather into denotative speech, incorporating the connotations of song in the music of the poem. (Full disclosure: Some of these poems have appeared in the New Criterion. All I can say is, I liked them then, and I like them now.)

And the other man nodded and laughed,
then prodded the coals. He had a stick for that,
and worked it through the fire, back and forth,
back and forth, pausing every time it caught.
The stick would light; he’d lift and watch,
then let it go black out, working its tip
back down into the fire. He did this as
he talked about a truck at night
hit by a mortar shell so that it wrecked,
steering column pinning the driver’s chest,
driver talking fast, truck catching fire.

When the fire drives the rescuers from the truck, we hear the young man’s screams. With calm introspection the man describes how a gun goes off, / the young man’s sergeant walking back.

David Yezzi, executive editor of The New Criterion, is the author, most recently, of Azores: Poems.