Tipton Poetry Journal
Review: Tornadoesque by Donald Platt Reviewed by Dan Carpenter
Title: Tornadoesque Author: Donald Platt Year: 2016 Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Donald Platt’s fifth collection, Tornadoesque, is a beguiling paradox – a veritable feast of imagery, narrative, musings, aphorisms and polemics that’s laced with questions about the adequacy of language itself – and of all art – to represent the desire, horror and consolations of modern life, the author’s or the stricken world’s. The title poem and title word derive from a neologism coined by Platt’s young daughter, who “laughs, pleased at having found the right word for the weather / that possesses us.” If her word is right, though, then by implication it negates any term in her father’s bulging vocabulary for the truly menacing storm which the titillating symptoms of nasty weather only symbolize – his older daughter’s frenetic struggle with bipolar disorder. Platt’s depictions of those nightmarish (and often darkly comic) adventures, featured most prominently in the marathon “Litany on 1st Avenue for My Daughter,” are as masterful as they are harrowing. Yet mastery, whether of his predicaments or of his utterances about them, appears to be the last impression Platt wishes to convey. He knows we know he writes with world-class authority; but his core message is the humility demanded of the poet who takes on heavy lifting. In “Nonetheless,” he gets the point across by resorting to someone else’s (non-literary) words, via a found poem that raises the bar for that subgenre. Specifically, it is a Dadaist poem, fashioned from scissored fragments of a New York Times article about a Corporal Jason Poole and his devastating injuries from an explosion in Iraq.
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