ISBN: 9781946830159

“To approach old age, one needs a new harsher style,” advises Donald Platt in his award-winning Swansdown. And yet these poems are proof of the softness that may attend life’s harshest reckonings, like the wisps of hair on his beloved brother’s head as he lies dying, “fine / as milkweed silk. / His head a split / dried pod whose seeds / wind will scatter.” The poems of Swansdown point us to a “larger landscape,” they are the clouds “that scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. . . Sun’s blazon through rain rampant.”