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Cover image of The Lover’s Guide to Trapping
Cover image of The Lover’s Guide to Trapping
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The Lover’s Guide to Trapping

Wyatt Prunty

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Wyatt Prunty’s eighth collection, The Lover’s Guide to Trapping, opens with a Homeric mole who tunnels the yard then disappears, a nervous alpha dog convinced she gets less food than her sister because she eats faster, and a house wren whose loud expectation is that she be let in. And there are others who populate the pages of this book, one stray cat, one ghost, but many who are human—soldiers, prisoners, wide-eyed children, matriarchs, Verdi in despair over having cast a plump Violetta who cannot play her role as a consumptive. All of those described here are vulnerable, some of them...

Wyatt Prunty’s eighth collection, The Lover’s Guide to Trapping, opens with a Homeric mole who tunnels the yard then disappears, a nervous alpha dog convinced she gets less food than her sister because she eats faster, and a house wren whose loud expectation is that she be let in. And there are others who populate the pages of this book, one stray cat, one ghost, but many who are human—soldiers, prisoners, wide-eyed children, matriarchs, Verdi in despair over having cast a plump Violetta who cannot play her role as a consumptive. All of those described here are vulnerable, some of them searingly so, and all are acutely aware of just how angular their worlds can be, whether accompanied by terror or hilarity.

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Reviews

These poems have depth and richness of observation that repels easy emotion and compel—and reward—repeated reading.

In his eighth book of verse, Wyatt Prunty's low-keyed eloquence conveys an authentic ache that more declamatory poets sometimes miss.

There are vast expanses of ordinary fabric, bejeweled by moments of existential clarity... Prunty holds everyday experience up to the light in such a way that it seems anything but. He has an exquisite hold on life.

A distinct and distinctive voice... best looked at not amongst his peers but in the light of an earlier generation of elegant formalists, from Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, to the less well-known Edgar Bowers and J. V. Cunningham.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
9
Pages
72
ISBN
9780801892790
Table of Contents

I
Mole
Big Dog, Little Dog
House Wren
Spencerian Hand
Last Century
Stazione Centrale
Incident in the Sublime
The Returning Dead
Circus
Albumen Silver Print from Glass Negative outside Chicago Station, 1887
II
The

I
Mole
Big Dog, Little Dog
House Wren
Spencerian Hand
Last Century
Stazione Centrale
Incident in the Sublime
The Returning Dead
Circus
Albumen Silver Print from Glass Negative outside Chicago Station, 1887
II
The Combine
Insomnias
Prudentius, Seneca, Boethius, etc.
Memory
The Insistent
Time's Train
Matriarchs
Two Views
1950
Fields
Parks
III
Gramercy Park
Marooned
Stray
Lincoln's Tunnel
Addio del passato
Endemic
Late Walks
An Early Guide to Trapping

Author Bio
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Wyatt Prunty

Wyatt Prunty is a professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South and the founding director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is the author of nine collections of poems, including The Lover's Guide to Trapping, and two critical works.
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