Tender Voyeur
“Tender Voyeur tells the doubled story of two doubled lives—one, the story of the author’s bisexuality and troubled marriage; the other, the long-standing love affair between the artist John Singer Sargent and his model, valet, and house manager Nicola D’Inverno. In these lush and sensual poems, Platt inhabits Sargent’s paintings, finding a location for his own rich, interior life; its desires and betrayals, its cleavings. Much as Sargent finds the muscular and the erotic in his sketches and figure studies, Platt, too, finds the ‘lustrous leisure’ in this novella in verse. In Sargent, Platt finds a representative, a resonance, a kindred soul—a painter ‘who paints a place where pleasure ripples the millpond.’”
Donald Platt is the author of eight previous collections, including Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (Cavankerry Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Iowa Review, Southern Review, and Paris Review, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s MFA Program.
Tender Voyeur, Donald Platt’s ninth collection, tells the story of the author’s coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted. A major ekphrastic project, Tender Voyeur features high-quality reproductions of Sargent’s paintings and drawings, interlaced with poems that interrogate the place of same-sex love at the turn of the 20th century and explore conflicting sexual desires in the different worlds of Sargent and of the author.
An essay by historian and curator Trevor Fairbrother accompanies the work, discussing the political, financial, and puritanical obstacles that have hampered open discussion of Sargent’s sexuality. An interview between Platt and Fairbrother, whose groundbreaking study of homoeroticism in Sargent’s oeuvre inspired Tender Voyeur, acts as a coda, providing additional insight into the work and the collaboration that brought it forward.
