Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
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!Synopsis
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!
Publishers Weekly
Platt's first collection is so full of vitality and emotion that the lines seem either to weep or explode: ``The days are deciduous. / They keep falling, / dead leaves / the wind blows / down the street / and scatters, or heaps / into windrows, / which I walk through / kicking the leaves / so they crackle and spark / under my shoes.'' He helps us to feel the edges and curves of letters on the tongue, the lyric ``grit of words.'' As the title suggests, Platt would join all the world together in surprising juxtaposition and wait to see what happens: ``For sale, fresh peaches / and slide-action Remingtons, / tempered steel and bruisable fruit, a collision / collusion that makes / me feel suddenly fragile, a dissonance as pure / as Mozart's, two notes / never put together until now and now forever / inextricable.'' He sings with delight of the Midwest--the tarred superhighways and endless acres of farmland. And with a surplus of compassion, Platt prays, believes, remembers, glories; nothing is too insignificant to be revered, as in these lines from ``Short Mass for My Grandfather'': ``I bow down to the scarecrow / dressed in Grandfather's best shirt / worn through at the elbows. / Lord of Cornfields, Lord of Crows, / watch over us, / your face / rained away.'' This is a wide-eyed appreciation of the universe. (Apr.)