Description

Book Synopsis
In his third collection of poems, ""My Father Says Grace"", Donald Platt mixes elegy with 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 elegy for a mother-in-law provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Janis Joplin and Walt Whitman. The private life ""in the valley of the shadow of death"" often gets crossed with explicitly political poems, such as a meditation on the long history of racial tensions in the deep South, or one on a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed 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, exploring how ""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 by Donald Platt

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    A Paperback / softback by Donald Platt

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      View other formats and editions of My Father Says Grace: Poems by Donald Platt by Donald Platt

      Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
      Publication Date: 31/03/2007
      ISBN13: 9781557288370, 978-1557288370
      ISBN10: 1557288372

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      In his third collection of poems, ""My Father Says Grace"", Donald Platt mixes elegy with 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 elegy for a mother-in-law provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Janis Joplin and Walt Whitman. The private life ""in the valley of the shadow of death"" often gets crossed with explicitly political poems, such as a meditation on the long history of racial tensions in the deep South, or one on a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed 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, exploring how ""to be 'carried across,' away, out, toward, back into some new country where the soul improvises, croons scat to itself alone.

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