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    Nuda Veritas
    Nuda Veritas
    Nuda Veritas
    Ebook339 pages1 hour

    Nuda Veritas

    By Eugene Platt

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    About this ebook

    In this volume, beautifully produced by Revival Press, Eugene Platt invites us to travel with him on a survey of a long writing life in poems that cloak their craft and technique in language deceptively simple and direct. He confronts tragedies and disappointments without bitterness or sentimentality, finding joy and hope in unexpected places. Eugene’s poetry speaks from the heart with a clarity of vision and generosity of spirit which make this volume a delight to read.
    —Michael Farry, Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin; author, The Age of Glass and Troubles.
    Nuda Veritas is a celebration of life and death. The poems are expressed with eloquence, beauty, and grace. As in “Simple Words,” the poet “conveys the otherwise unconveyable” and in “A Widower’s Fifth September” brings tears with the words “to hold your hand in mine again and hear your voice.”
    —Sue Walker, Ph. D., Tulane University; Poet Laureate of Alabama (2003-2012).

    A poet of discovery, Eugene Platt delves into a vast well of experience and brings to the surface a reverence for family, love, enduring life, and American history. These poems span romance and war, birth and death, and the varied, sometimes contradictory experiences of a man traveling through this thing we call life. Here, meditations of lost love and walking the dog sidle up next to folk songs and prayer. The music-filled poems in Nuda Veritas distill expansive ideas into delightful verse revealing veneration for the quotidian and attention to detail as minute as a mustard seed.
    —Lisa Hase-Jackson, M.A., M.F.A.; author, Flint & Fire; Editor-in-Chief, South 85 Journal.

    In this ambitious compendium of highly personal verse, Charleston poet Eugene Platt yaws gently from the heroic to the whimsical, tracing a journey through settings real and remembered in detail rendered with precision and delight. Perhaps he appears most at home echoing the tides and currents that have inundated and sustained the South Carolina Lowcountry for centuries. What a gift to have this volume coincide with Charleston’s commemoration of 350 years from its colonial settlement, and likewise to mark 100 years of resolute collegiality for the Poetry Society of South Carolina.
    —Scott Watson, Director of Cultural Affairs, City of Charleston

    This is poetry speaks from the heart with a clarity of vision and generosity of spirit which make this volume a delight to read.
    —Michael Farry, Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin; author, The Age of Glass and Troubles.
    Nuda Veritas is a celebration of life and death. The poems are expressed with eloquence, beauty, and grace.
    —Sue Walker, Ph. D., Tulane University; Poet Laureate of Alabama (2003-2012).

    A poet of discovery, Eugene Platt delves into a vast well of experience and brings to the surface a reverence for family, love, enduring life, and American history. Nuda Veritas distill expansive ideas into delightful verse revealing veneration for the quotidian and attention to detail as minute as a mustard seed.
    —Lisa Hase-Jackson, M.A., M.F.A.; author, Flint & Fire; Editor-in-Chief, South 85 Journal.

    In this ambitious compendium Charleston poet Eugene Platt yaws gently from the heroic to the whimsical, tracing a journey through settings real and remembered in detail rendered with precision and delight. What a gift to have this volume coincide with Charleston’s commemoration of 350 years from its colonial settlement, and likewise to mark 100 years of resolute collegiality for the Poetry Society of South Carolina.
    —Scott Watson, Director of Cultural Affairs, City of Charleston

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLimerick Writers Centre
    Release dateAug 18, 2020
    ISBN9781005745462
    Nuda Veritas
    Author

    Eugene Platt

    Eugene Platt was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1939. After serving in the Army, he graduated from the University of South Carolina and earned a Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His poems have appeared in many literary publications and some have been choreographed. He has given over 100 public readings of his work and was invited to read in the inaugural Dublin Arts Festival in 1970. He wasthe first Poet Laureate of the Town of James Island and was Poet-in-Residence for public radio station WSCI. He lives in Charleston with his main muses: Montreal-born wife Judith, corgi Bess, and cats Finnegan and Maeve.

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      Book preview

      Nuda Veritas - Eugene Platt

      It has taken me a long time to write this. I have had to let the book sit in my stomach until I fully digested it on a macro scale. In doing so, I have asked myself how I can understand the collection as a whole, given that the poems are from many different decades, of all forms, several different themes, and range from heartbreaking to hilarious. Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that what Eugene Platt offers the world with this book is the gift of the life experiences of an octogenarian distilled with great craft and talent. He had to do a whole lot of living to write this book and it shows.

      Throughout time, there have been wunderkinder in most human arts, sciences, and athletics. Years ago, I investigated the topic of child prodigy poets. I discovered that there has been almost no such thing in history. There have been a few instances in the bygone days when people sat in parlors and recited poetry where children were elevated to some level of fame for having skill beyond their years at rhyme and meter—in other words, they were precocious in the structure of poetry, the nuts and bolts of it. But they had nothing much to say or teach, really.

      To read through the poems in Nuda Veritas is to be haunted by the memories and introspection of a long lifetime, delivered in such vivid detail and naked honesty that they live in your head and heart for days after putting down the book. My thoughts are alive with a mother disappearing into the gloom of senility, a father’s last ride to the hospital, the unanesthetized pain of divorce, the fleeting years of childhood, and travels to beautiful places imbued with melancholy and comedy. It is reading a collection like this that makes it clear why there are no child prodigies in the field of poetry.

      Jim Lundy, President

      The Poetry Society of South Carolina

      Preface

      For years I have tried to find a technique through which a man might reveal himself without embarrassment. There are two fairly successful examples of this technique—Don Quixote and Joyce’s Ulysses. Sancho Panza and Mr. Bloom are the private lives of two public men. I have found that only in verse can one confess with dignity. We have all done mean and ugly things and nearly always these sins should be confessed because of the damage they have done to us.

      — Patrick Kavanagh, Self Portrait

      What makes for a perfect year? I doubt anyone ever has had an absolutely perfect one. Nonetheless, my year at Trinity College Dublin, 1969-1970, was as nearly perfect as any for which a poor poet could hope. A primary reason for positive memories of that year was my discovery of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. Even now, a half-century later, I remain grateful to Brendan Kennelly, who led me to that discovery. As a token of appreciation, a poem in this collection, After Inniskeen, is dedicated to him.

      In the painting Nuda Veritas by Gustav Klimt, a naked Eve appears to be holding a hand mirror outward as if to urge onlookers, rather than ogle her beguiling body, to consider the naked truth about themselves. This interpretation complements Kavanagh’s conclusion. Thus, even the otherwise timid or uptight societally constrained poet can consider the Nuda Veritas about himself, then confess it with dignity in verse.

      I learned this early. In the long-ago 1970s and 1980s, as a young, bearded poet active on the reading circuit, sometimes my readings on college and university campuses were billed as Private Thoughts for Public Ears. Even now in the late afternoon of my poetic journey, I am able to convey in an occasional poem something I could never write in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, or confess to my parish priest.

      Thank God for the perquisites of poetry.

      Eugene Platt

      April 2020

      Contents

      Folly Beach Hotdogs

      Listen

      Melontime

      Eat Strawberries and Seize the Day

      Musing at the Music Barn

      Saturday Night Fare

      Hampton Park Revisited

      Filial

      My Father

      Pennies from Heaven

      Flight 227

      The Greatest Man

      Transition

      Message at the Dentist’s

      The American Way

      Prayer on the Eve of My Father’s Funeral

      The Last Ride

      The Girl Across the Street

      Ashley River

      Edisto Hours

      Main Crops, South Carolina

      Sign Language

      Preservation Society

      Re-Doing the Charleston

      Carolina Sands

      Carolina Sands Elegy

      Wine, Wild Flowers, and West Virginia

      Fantasy for a July Day at Killiney Bay

      Moment

      Disquiet

      The Last Tryst

      Passion and Ice

      Carolina Rose

      Remembering the Girl at the Party

      The Rites of Thanksgiving

      Outer Banks Explanation

      Washington, D.C.

      A Long Way from New Orleans

      An Angel from South Africa

      Summer Swimmer

      Winter Tree

      To a Red-Haired Exorcist

      A Loaf of Love

      Blue Robe

      Boxing Day on Tobago

      Praise God for Grits

      Nomad

      In the Land of Disenchantment

      Final Decree

      For a Lost Son

      On Vacating a Condo in Reston, Virginia

      Visitation Rights

      A Pregnant Woman

      Second Genesis

      New Life

      New Priorities

      Two Years at Kitty Hawk

      Sandbox

      Summer Days with Daughter

      Portrait of a Daughter

      To a Second Granddaughter

      To a New Son

      The Words

      Metaphors Be with You

      A Somber Day in San Francisco

      A Passion Play

      The Light of Life

      Slaughter of the Innocents

      Solace on the Puget Sound

      Love After the Flood

      Perennial

      Joy/La Joie

      My Solemn Vow

      Love Poem for a Dying Wife

      Simple Words

      A Widower’s Fifth September

      A Clump of Cat

      War Games

      My Lai Meditation

      The Fort Jackson Bugles

      Message from a Father Who Died on D-Day

      Deaths of a Soldier

      For Dag Hammarskjold

      Dresden’s Frauenkirche Weeps for Notre-Dame de Paris

      Paean to a Girl in a Poetry Workshop

      Lines for a Young Poet

      Poets in Trees

      A Poet Learns the New Math

      At the Writers Conference

      Going for the Gold Bug

      Overdose

      Psyching Out My Psychiatrist

      Celestial Figs

      Captain Ahab’s Ditty

      Haiku of a Whale

      Ahead of the Game

      Adam’s Lament

      Nuda Veritas

      Celestial Navigation

      The Eagle Within

      Sailplane Pilot’s Fantasy in Flight

      Lenten Meditation

      Ash Wednesday Meditation

      Holy Saturday Headline

      Prayer for a Pandemic

      The Dogwood Blossoms Disregard Social Distancing

      Folly Beach in the Age of Coronavirus

      The Tornadoes Next Time

      Destination Dublin

      Lucca

      At Trinity College

      After Inniskeen

      Rhetorical Questions for John Berryman

      Charity

      Famine

      The Untied Kingdom

      A Regal Swan on the River Shannon

      Waiting for the Train at Ballybrophy Junction

      Forbidden Fruit at Dublin Airport

      Menage a Quatre

      Cooking with Gas

      Crying at the Krispy Kreme

      Connubial Trash Talk

      Walking Our Old Corgi

      Our Cat Eschews the Evening News

      In a Butcher Shop in Bushmills

      Thank-You Note to My New Wife’s Late Husband

      Foreword

      Preface

      Acknowledgements

      Also by Eugene Platt

      A Note about the Poet

      A Note from the Poet’s Daughter

      About on Revival Press

      Folly Beach Hotdogs

      Folly Beach hotdogs

      -probably the world’s best-

      except, maybe, those you relished

      in your own hometown’s playground.

      I often wonder

      what made them so great.

      I guess it was the onions and mustard

      -and the sand, a grinding reminder

      to ten-year-old gourmets

      that with every bite

      we were devouring

      Folly Beach hotdogs.

      Summers later

      my interest turned

      from hotdogs to cool girls,

      the ones who safely stationed themselves

      sixty feet from the surf,

      hiding behind sunglasses and feigned disinterest.

      I loved them seasonally,

      but a fellow can have no more than a fling

      with girls who only want to have fun,

      and I was looking for something deep---

      like

      the

      sea.

      Folly girls weren’t for me.

      Youth’s gone now.

      The youth that surfboarded in this morning

      was washed out to sea with the noon tide

      of imminent middle age.

      I still come to the beach,

      but I walk farther,

      down past the hotdogs and cool girls.

      I walk alone along this fragile Edge of America,

      seeking a place of solace,

      a pristine place where only the ocean

      separates a wistful walker from fabled Africa.

      I keep walking, seeking a site

      not yet found by anyone unmoved

      by the beauty of such a beach.

      I walk until I reach a secluded spot

      to share only with a couple of seagulls,

      a crab or two, a few terns.

      There I spread an olive drab

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