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9781557530486 Academic Inspection Copy

Fresh Peaches, Fireworks and Guns

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"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." Using liturgical echoes and rhythm shoplifted wholesale from his upbringing as a preacher's son, the poet mixes the visionary and the vulgar to create poems in which Mozart and billboards, Emily Dickinson and fake Rococo cuckoo clocks, the nature of God and rush-hour traffic on I-95, all coincide. Even while bearing witness to the chronic sorrows of the world, the poet finds rapture. He imagines how his unborn child will "come kicking / into the blinding / searching of sunlight, to add its own wails to the sum / of all the other / cries, which are the only praise there is." This book is half cry, half psalm.
Donald Platt has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow and a Steffenson Cannon Scholar. In 1988, he won an award in the Virginia Prize for Poetry Competition. In 1992, he was a co-winner of the "Discovery"/ The Nation Contest. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Nation, among other leading journals. He makes his home in Salt Lake City.
"Like the Mozart of his imagination, Donald Platt finds the notes that love one another and (like his Mozart), puts them together. . . . He has a delicate ear, Platt, and a generous mind that lets the world come in. His range is connected to his unrelenting memory and his intense pity and his unforgetting eye. He is a fine poet."
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