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MY
FATHER SAYS GRACE
Poems by Donald Platt
Lyrical
poems of optimism and grace
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
southern town’s Amazing Grace Beauty Salon. Another
describes a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed while
sticking flowers in an MP’s gun barrel, alongside images
from his later life as a transvestite.
The poems
tend to find themselves in the midst of crisis, historical
or personal. They yearn for “transport” and strive
“to be ‘carried across,’ away, out, toward,
back into / / some new country / where the soul improvises,
croons scat to itself alone.”
“This
is a book of the highest lyric ambitions. Almost every poem,
however plain-spoken its subject, sets itself challenges of
language and order which are met head on. On almost every
page there is a marvelous to-and-fro between darkness of loss—a
father’s approaching death, a brother’s vulnerability—and
the exuberance of language, the sheer eloquence of organization
which are no less than their due. These are wonderful poems;
they make superb, wrenching reading.”
—Eavan Boland, author of Outside History: Selected
Poems, 1980–1990 and Domestic Violence
“Donald
Platt’s poems are fearless and generous aria-narratives,
each distilling complex essences into a single, telling scene;
through their attentive particularities, universal colors
emerge. The abiding affirmation in Donald Platt’s work
is that whatever exists must be made welcome and known. The
result is an optimistic book, full of compassion, interest,
and sheen, in an age when an unblended optimism is much needed.”
—Jane Hirshfield, author of Given Sugar, Given Salt
and After
“Grief-struck and world-adoring, these poems—in
their gorgeous and distinctive swelling and contracting tercets—say
grace for a family struggling with a father's stroke and dementia,
a brother's Down syndrome, a mother-in-law's terminal cancer.
My Father Says Grace constructs its layer on layer
of elegy in a fugue-like structure, with tenderness, humor,
and startling intimacy. Platt's poems move beyond the personal
circumstances of illness, loss, and proleptic grief toward
something like an autobiographical metaphysics, meditating
unflinchingly on a world of aging, death, and loss and saying,
in its own devastating way, yes and amen.”
—Bruce Beasley, author of Lord Brain and The
Corpse
Donald
Platt is an associate professor of English
at Purdue University. His previous collections, Fresh
Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns and Cloud Atlas,
were published by Purdue University Press as winners of the
Verna Emery Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/The
Nation Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Center for Book Arts’ Poetry Chapbook
Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in
many magazines and journals, including The New Republic,
Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Kenyon
Review, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly
Review, Field, Iowa Review, Southwest
Review, and Southern Review, and have been anthologized
in The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2006. He lives
with his wife, the poet Dana Roeser, and their two daughters
in West Lafayette, Indiana.
March
2007
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 96 pages
$16.00 paper
978–1-55728–837–0
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