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.