Fresh Peaches, Fireworks & Guns
Paperback (30 Jun 1994)
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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.
Book information
ISBN: | 9781557530486 |
Publisher: | Purdue University Press |
Imprint: | Purdue University Press |
Pub date: | 30 Jun 1994 |
DEWEY: | 811.54 |
DEWEY edition: | 20 |
Language: | English |
Number of pages: | 86 |
Weight: | 163g |
Height: | 216mm |
Width: | 165mm |
Spine width: | 6mm |