The Divine Comedy meets Southern Gothic

My review of Wyatt Prunty's new book, Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise, has just been published in The Weekly Standard (click the picture, or here to read). An excerpt:

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.