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The Couple's Disease: Finding a Cure for Your "Lost" Love Life

Self-Help

Platt, Donald

Hakim, Lawrence

Dhp Pub

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.”

My Father Says Grace: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Arkansas Press

“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 possess – as Mark Rudman has observed – an enviable roughness of language, which captures the abrasiveness of the world as it impinges and presses down on consciousness.” Using liturgical echoes and rhythm shoplifted wholesale from his upbringing as a preacher’s son, the poet mixes the visionary and the vulgar to create poems in which Mozart and billboards, Emily Dickinson and fake Rococo cuckoo clocks, the nature of God and rush-hour traffic on I-95, all coincide. Even while bearing witness to the chronic sorrows of the world, the poet finds rapture. He imagines how his unborn child will “come kicking / into the blinding / searching of sunlight, to add its own wails to the sum / of all the other / cries, which are the only praise there is.” This book is half cry, half psalm.

Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, and Guns

Purdue University Press

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.

Cloud Atlas

In his sixth book, Donald Platt starts a poem by exclaiming, "The days are one thousand / puzzle pieces." He gathers up the days into this book of terrors and ecstasies decanted in seamlessly reversing tercets of long and short lines, syllabic couplets, and lyric prose. The puzzle pieces include a dying father-in-law, AIDS, maimed World War I veterans, Caravaggio's painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist (his largest canvas), and the story of a gay boxer who KOs and kills the opponent who has called him a faggot at the weigh-in. It is a book that encompasses contradictions. The poet writes about his bisexuality, his close and intimate marriage, Rudolf Nureyev, a daughter with manic depression, a painting by James Ensor entitled Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, and la Playa los Muertos, the Beach of the Dead in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The poet puts these fragments of a life together into a thousand-piece jigsaw, a self-portrait of the artist in middle age, and calls it unabashedly Man Praying.
These poems--powered by Donald Platt's extensive curiosity---spin out his fascinations in such loving detail that I am persuaded to look closer, not only at what his mind examines, but the world itself. By turning and turning his subjects before our eyes, he deepens our awareness of life's complexities and wonders, and offers a testament to the power of intelligence to foster a sense of purpose and belonging. His gaze is a kind of reverence.
--Bob Hicok
Want a narrative poem that doesn't sound dated, or clunky, or stunt-like? Platt did, so he wrote one ["The Main Event"]: in 1962 one professional boxer killed another, in the ring, on live TV. The victim, Benny "The Kid" Paret, had called the killer, Emile Griffith, "a maricón / Cuban slang for 'faggot.'" Griffith would later "become / world champ four more times"; he was, in fact, gay, and was once "beaten almost / to death by five young / homophobes, one with a baseball bat." If you're wondering why there should be narrative poems or reported stories in verse even today, one answer is that stories like this one benefit from the compression of verse, its ability to focus on single phrases and words. Another answer is Platt's poem.
--Steph Burt, bostonreview.net/blog
This poet is fearless. "I like to think. . . ." So goes the first line of Man Praying but it's dreaming at stake too, a man dreaming with heart, curiosity, pain. "The days are one thousand/ puzzle pieces," the poet tells us, without despair. And thus these rambling meticulous poems open to the world grandly and in the smallest ways--how artists see (Rivera, Caravaggio, Mary Hambleton, Brancusi, for starters); how others reinvent the body (Nureyev, boxers, and whoever wrestles like Jacob with whatever angel); how some die and the rest of us survive, for now. Which is to say, the dead and the living walk through these poems--father, daughters, all family as guardians, fellow travelers, radiant lights. Donald Platt's rare mix of story sacred and profane cut with lyric discovery fills these pages. "Silence, final word, sear my mouth," the poet says. But I say: Silence, don't listen to him.
--Marianne Boruch

Man Praying (Free Verse Editions)

Parlor Press

Winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, a masterful collection by Donald Platt, "one of the finest American poets working today," writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka In SWANSDOWN, the poet Donald Platt makes a study of lifeís inevitable transitions, from loveís astonishing evolutions, to aging and its attendant losses. With the poem "Cloud Study" Platt brings his own mortality into view. Returning to a painting by Constable, he considers his own perspective, sitting by the Liffey, tending an injured knee. Young mothers, lovers, and runners pass, reminding the poet of who he once was and how quickly life, like weather, shifts. "Two minutes later, // The clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shape / just like the thunderheads / now piling up above the Liffey." Platt advises: "To approach old age, one needs a new harsher style." And yet these poems are proof of the softness that may follow life's harshest reckonings, like the wisps of hair on his beloved brother's head as he lies dying, "fine / as milkweed silk. / His head a split / dried pod whose seeds / wind will scatter." The poems of Swansdown point us to a "larger landscape," they are the clouds "that scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. . . Sun's blazon through rain rampant." "One of the finest American poets working today," writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka, "A writer of unparalleled lyric and formal integrity." It is indeed these qualities that gird Platt for this masterful eighth collection. Poetry.

Swansdown

Off the Grid Press

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