Capturing the World, Connecting Past and Present

Wyatt Prunty begins "Prudentius, Seneca, Boethius, Etc." by writing, "So in my fifty-seventh year what use? / Time devours all things." In my sixty-eighth year poetry no longer inspires or blows my thoughts high toward abstraction, awe, or sublimity—call that elevated vagary what one may. Instead poetry slows the mechanical clacking of rapacious time by quickening observation and memory, thus enabling me to live more intensely in the past while simultaneously increasing appreciation of the small appointments of the present. In so doing, poetry, to lean on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," refreshes life. Instead of an unacknowledged legislator, the poet becomes a better being, a companion and friend, someone whose conversation brightens hours.

Among the absurdities spawned by romanticism's celebration of childhood is that anatomically impossible fetus, at least in males, the inner child—complemented by the spurious ophthalmological tenet that children see more closely and deeply than adults, our mature vision "cataracted" and "glaucomaed" by temporizing accommodation to the world. Of course, because most children are shorter and thus closer to the ground than adults, they occasionally notice minutiae that adults overlook. Unfortunately children are fabulously ignorant, and no wealth of stem-winding sentimentality can endow them with superior, almost pentecostal, awareness. Not youth but middle age is the time of sharper vision. In middle age the grip of ambition weakens. Moreover people generally realize that if happiness and wisdom are to be found they will be found in the closely observed that is near at hand rather than far away. As a result people who were once blinkered and hard-thrusting evolve into gardeners and bird-watchers.

In The Lover's Guide to Trapping Prunty observes natural doings closely. A mole tunnels "Through the root-rich, fibrous, mineral dark, / Buckling up in sagging illegibles / The cuneiforms and cursives of a blind scribe"; he is a "Berm builder edging the runneling world" and the "Myopic master of the possible." Prunty makes readers eager to see the mole in the spring "when he surfaces, lumplike, bashful." Prunty calls the air "greenrich," a transformation his poetry accomplishes, greening both the air and a reader's ordinary days. His "House Wren" is "knot-sized, a bump on bark." In the poem a wren comes through an open window and builds a nest behind the narrator's desk so that bird and man work together—"Each type turning out its type peacefully."

For the older, and perhaps unpoetical, reader, appreciation depends greatly upon a familiar fallacy—that is reading poems can bring personal experience to mind, at best quickening recollection and enabling a person to re-create mood or experience. In reading "House Wren" I wandered beyond Prunty's verse to Carolina wrens and my garage. For years Carolina wrens have wintered there. I do not close the garage door until after dusk when I know the wrens are inside. Wrens rise early, and at six, before I eat breakfast, I open the door so that, if the birds choose, they can fly outside. If I were to shut the birds out in the cold, my life would be diminished, my days stripped of a small nuisance and the cause for pleasant complaint. "Perfect yourself in every watchfulness," Prunty advises in "An Early Guide to Trapping," noting literally and metaphorically that "Food comes to the focused eye." In "Big Dog, Little Dog" Prunty focuses on affection for a dog manifested in a simple thing: breaking a bigger, probably older, dog's food into pieces and scattering them so that the dog finishes her meal at the same time as her companion, a little dog, who because of its smaller jaw eats more slowly, making the bigger dog think that she has been given less food and has lost favor with her master. The act is one of those "little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness," as Wordsworth puts it. The deed lightens a moment and satisfies a reader's hankering for warming decency, age having shucked aside...