038

I bought Donald Platt's My Father Says Grace because I meant to buy a Robert Pinsky book but didn't like the cover art. Next to it was a book whose spine said "Arkansas," and one of my mentors is having his book released by the University of Arkansas Press in 2008.

My Father Says Grace was released in 2007. The cover photograph is a Picasso. I was already buying it. I knew the name of the poetry series' editor. I had to see what James was following. I didn't know anything about Donald Platt.

Donald Platt knows how to end a poem and how to open a book. He knows how to write in between, too: "You see // everything for the first time because / it has become the last time" ("Compass Rose"). I should have placed that in context, I suppose.

The images, the lasting visions, are stinging. And by saying it that way, you know that I mean that I love them. Overall, this book is "about" endings, loss, deaths great and small. But it's not dirty or depressing. The book is not a warning against death. In My Father Says Grace, frailty is earned. Never is the real focus on what his father lacks because of dementia but on the fullness of life and the sparkle that has to still be there as his mind fights itself awake. Or maybe I don't know how to read about death.

The poems swell and contract, as Bruce Beasley said in his review on the back of the book. You are reading music, and Platt talks about music many times. So he would know whether to compare the poems to sonatas or arias, another word I'm stealing, or whatever.

You watch the effects of time and health on parent-child relationships. In poems like "Name & Address," you fall in love with the sweet father, a man nearing the end of his life as his memory is leaving him, one who never surrenders, who is still the handsome man in the wallet-sized photograph his mother keeps by the phone and is the little dude you want to protect on the way to the grocery store. Platt shows trauma that's not suicide, AIDS, sexual violation, drugs. I've read a lot of those books now, and I fucking love them, too, but this was writing closer to my own life.

I tried to finish that sentence in a few words, but it's difficult right now for whatever reason. The best way to say it may just be the long way: When I write my family into my poems, none of those four things appears. I've discussed with my mentors and writer-friends, half-jokingly, that I worry about having anything to write because my childhood and life are just too goddamn normal and okay. Platt shows how to do it. And right now, in late October, that's the mood I want to read and write.

At times, Platt pauses the world; while splitting wood during the fall in part of"Compass Rose," a circling elegy for the poet's beloved mother-in-law; at 35,000 feet above the earth on the way to the Indianapolis airport in "Ground Transport," the closing poem. I've tried to write poems about the stillness of flying home, and I'm glad I have someone to copy for that.

There are plenty of moments of melancholy, memorials steeped in social and political outrage ("Amazing Grace Beauty Salon"), but Platt reminds us that we are not so simple as to bury ourselves completely in our sadness. Playfulness ("Cartwheels"), tenderness ("Two Poets Meet"), romance, resilience, and tribute, in carefully placed intervals, bring the poems alive.

I didn't think "quaint" or "precious." This book knows that life is what the living do, and everyone is fighting for it.

This book is a chorus, a burst, wrought from love and fighting and unrest and the thing inside the writer that says, "Push. Write it down." Whatever it is.

I devoured this fucking book.