Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781421417141 Academic Inspection Copy

Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise

  • ISBN-13: 9781421417141
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Wyatt Prunty
  • Price: AUD $41.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/07/2015
  • Format: Paperback 72 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Poetry [DC]
Description
Table of
Contents
Reviews
Google
Preview
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 Pruntys 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 catalogues diseases, the worst of which come 'from intimate contact,' he is horrified by his father's explanation of grown up 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 humour 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 colourfully musical, 'Nod' plays what teeters, like a tuning for

I. Making Frankenstein
Rules
Thin
Crescent Theater, Schenectady, NY
The Gladiator of Misgivings
Promise
Bluefin
Bad Dog
Long Summers
Small Facts
Beginning the Ending
What Kind
Checks & Balances
Another Christmas Tie This Year
Reading the Map
as lib
II. Nod
Acknowledgments

""In these intimate confessions of'as the jacket says''childish misgivings and adult assurances,' Wyatt Prunty brings a grace and dignity to the speaking voice, as well as ironical humour in the case of the adult assurances.""

Google Preview content