In his third collection, My Father Says Grace, Donald Platt combines elegy with verse of larger historical allusion and reference. At the center of the book stand poems detailing a fatheras stroke and slowly developing Alzheimeras disease and how it affects one family. An extended meditation on a mother-in-lawas dying provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Walt Whitman and Janis Joplin. The private life in athe valley of the shadow of deatha often gets juxtaposed with explicitly political verse. One of these poems records the racially charged conversations in a small southern townas Amazing Grace Beauty Salon. Another describes a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed while sticking flowers in an MPas gun barrel, alongside images from his later life as a transvestite. The poems tend to find themselves in the midst of crisis, historical or personal. They yearn for atransporta and strive ato be acarried across, a away, out, toward, back into / / some new country / where the soul improvises, croons scat to itself alone.a