My Father Says Grace: Poems

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.

Donald Platt is an associate professor of English at Purdue University. His previous collections, Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, and Guns and Cloud Atlas, both won the Verna Emery Poetry Prize. A recipient of the "Discovery"/The Nation award and two Pushcart Prizes, his poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry anthologies for 2000 and 2006.