Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2017. 124 pages. $16.00.
The opening stanzas of Donald Platt’s Man Praying perform, in miniature, the formal and thematic maneuvers of the collection as a whole.
“I like to think / Eurydice when she walked up the long, steep, stony path // out of hell . . . ,” Platt begins in “Eurydice in Hell,” letting the sentence’s description of its mythical bride branch and subdivide for seven more lines before, Orpheus-like, looking back conclusively on its original subject: “I like to think Eurydice / walked on sharp / stones. . . .”
Locating Platt’s poetics in the post-romantic tradition of the excursus—think, for instance, of Wordsworth’s ubiquitous linking of thinking and walking—the passage announces the pleasure to be had in discursive thought, in letting one’s syntax navigate, in real time, the byways and interchanges through which the mind wanders. Platt’s speaker, in other words, drapes his own internal monologue over the scaffolding of poetic form. His is an intimate, often unfiltered speaker who—for more contemporary reference—takes up the “ultra-talk” mode of poets like Denise Duhamel and David Kirby. Whereas that mode, however, frequently restricts itself to surface texture—to voice as an effect—Platt’s writing is richly multidimensional, characterized by tonal range and nimble intellectual association.
If these are poems of the mind, that is, they are equally poems of the physical world, drawing from a stunning array of historical, artistic, and economic material and weaving this material together with elegant associative threading. A more apt contemporary comparison, therefore, might be the work of Albert Goldbarth, whose maximalist poems Platt’s own writing closely resembles. Like Goldbarth’s, Platt’s poetry is built on likeness, reference, and association, braiding together disparate narratives to the point that, plait-like, they come to constitute a single, elegant whole. The opening poem in Man Praying, for example, employs the myth of Eurydice as mythical background for an abusive relationship involving the speaker’s daughter, myth ghosting and at times bleeding through the personal narrative. Yet Platt’s emphasis on likeness—between myth and reality, between art and experience—manages at the same time to preserve an energizing distance among the material it coordinates. These poems push beyond simple comparison or juxtaposition, as when Platt notes that “Neither Orpheus / nor I can bring her // back. Eleanor needs her own God-given myth.” While a lesser poet would rest at the clean fitting of myth to reality, past to present, Platt demonstrates the ultimate insufficiency of myth, the ways in which we exceed those narratives by which we endeavor to understand our lives.
More than myth, however, Platt turns most frequently in Man Praying to art and art history as a means by which to assess present experience. Much of the collection is based on ekphrasis, with Platt incorporating not simply works of art themselves but artists’ statements, art criticism, historical background, physical science, and philosophical dialogue. In a poem about Caravaggio’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, for instance, Platt slides deftly from artwork to historical context, writing that “Caravaggio would have heard / the stories of how // during the Great Siege of Malta, forty years before he painted / this beheading, / La Valette [ . . . ] had ordered the dead Turks to be decapitated.” In another poem, “The Main Event,” about the boxer Emile Griffith, Platt passes gracefully into and out of the poem’s complicated ekphrastic frames. “As Emile hammers the Kid’s head with nine straight uppercuts,” Platt writes, “[ . . . ] one commentator observes, ‘That’s beautiful / camera work, / isn’t it?’ Another responds, ‘Yeah, terrific.’” Throughout Man Praying, Platt’s ekphrasis is thickly detailed, as if to notice and name were, for Platt, a reclamation; the collection frequently positions art as a form of preservation, an Eliotic effort, as Platt puts it in “La Playa los Muertos,” to “say the names of everything on the beach of the dead.” Platt images this redemptive project most explicitly in the poem “Fugitive Pigment,” in which a frame “cover[ing] / the watercolor’s left, right, and lower edges” ensures that “the pigment / did not fade.” In a collection so concerned with art and its effects, moreover, it is worth pointing out that South Carolina-based Parlor Press has done lovely work in crafting the art object that is Man Praying; the book is large-format, with extra-wide margins designed, it seems, to leave room for the reader to think and create alongside the poems themselves.
The shortcoming of this collection, related to its strengths, is a tendency to lose the thread of argument and idea in so much material detail, a tendency toward whiplash in the book’s vertiginous narrative veering. In most poems, Platt steers us adroitly through these redirections, but at times the numerous places and people that fill this collection hang only loosely together, affiliated more by proximity than by through-line argument. Similarly, Platt’s meticulous attention to works of art can become mired in fact, in compositional detail that prohibits the work of art from functioning, as it does in the best ekphrasis, as a filament or catalyst. Ultimately, this is a question of finding the proper calibration between description and statement, inhabiting, in so doing, the right critical distance from which one can arrange, order, and navigate the poem’s material. Yet these infrequent slippages are themselves taken up and thematized in the book’s larger argument, making it difficult to view them as shortcomings at all; specifically, Platt’s Man Praying worries a dialectic between materiality and transcendence, meditating on the capacity of human experience—including artistic experience, but also, in this collection, including sex, sport, family, and violence—to open onto and lead us toward spiritual fullness.
Platt is a profoundly reverent writer, as the title of this collection suggests, and at the heart of his writing is a deep wonder at and revelry in a material world through which, like light through gauze, some vaster spirit is always entering. In the masterful twenty-four-page poem “La Playa los Muertos,” Platt’s writing, journal-like, catalogs the lush, richly variegated life at a beachside Mexican resort. Palm fronds sway “like old men doing t’ai chi.” A father and daughter bat a small black ball back and forth between them. “A slalom water-skier in an orange life jacket kicks up rooster tails behind a speedboat.” “How can it be,” Platt asks, “that one day he will die.” How can it be that “I too will awake, step away from my body, leave this poem”? Man Praying asks this question in many forms, registering the beauty of embodied experience even, at the same time, while acknowledging our own limited materiality. In Platt’s hands, though, this material dazzles. In Platt’s hands, we are such stuff as art is made of.
