In his third collection, My Father Says Grace, Donald Platt combines elegy with verse of larger historical allusion and reference. At the center of the book stand poems detailing a father s stroke and slowly developing Alzheimer s disease and how it affects one family. An extended meditation on a mother-in-law s dying provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Walt Whitman and Janis Joplin. The private life in the valley of the shadow of death often gets juxtaposed with explicitly political verse. One of these poems records the racially charged conversations in a small...
In his third collection, My Father Says Grace, Donald Platt combines elegy with verse of larger historical allusion and reference. At the center of th...
Language, not geography, is where we live, says the insomniac poet at 4:00 A.M., flipping through all the different stations---grand opera, pop, and punk rock---on his radio. In the listening area that is this first collection of poems, Donald Platt tunes in the dissonances of his own and others' lives. Whatever their occasions, stopping at a roadside fruit stand in Georgia, a retarded brother learning to speak, childhood on a Midwestern farm, a grandmother's quilts, thumbing through the Gideon Bible in a cheap motel, the long algebraic equation of springtime in Virginia, these poems...
Language, not geography, is where we live, says the insomniac poet at 4:00 A.M., flipping through all the different stations---grand opera, pop, and p...
How can there be a book that maps these continents of clouds that drift apart, reshape their puzzle pieces, and coalesce into new geographies of air within one windblown hour? Donald Platt delights in enticing his readers with unique thoughts and questions such as this in Cloud Atlas. Being his second published book of poetry, the collection comes alive with elegance and refinement. Poems from this collection originally appeared in publications including The New England Review, The Best American Poetry 2000, Paris Review, New Republic, and The Kenyon Review.
How can there be a book that maps these continents of clouds that drift apart, reshape their puzzle pieces, and coalesce into new geographies of air w...
Through Platt s trademark of alternating long and short lines, and through occasional lyric prose, Tornadoesque becomes a weather report from middle age, as the poet discovers his bisexuality in a heterosexual marriage of longstanding passion, responds to war in the Middle East and the deaths and illnesses of friends, and gives an eyewitness account of what is lost and what s saved when a tornado touches down."
Through Platt s trademark of alternating long and short lines, and through occasional lyric prose, Tornadoesque becomes a weather report from middle a...
