Lamentations

"Lamentations is a thing of beauty . . . elegant, melancholy, rueful, and profound." —Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters The brilliant, darkly beautiful poems collected in LAMENTATIONS are a posthumous selection of early and late works by a poet too little known during his lifetime. Like Plath's ARIEL, it takes us deep into the inner world of a writer who, though battered by periodic depressions, displayed thrilling mastery as an artist. Through a chorus of voices—a gentle gay Orpheus recalling his blissful life and its nightmarish end; a college boy visiting friends by the sea; Lot fleeing from his burning city; an elderly man on a road trip to nowhere—Franklin guides us across a landscape of loss lit by flashes of ecstasy. The result is a book that feels at once agonizing and affirmative, revelatory and terrifyingly familiar. "Over and over in these astonishing poems, George Franklin turns the momentary into the eternal and the minute particulars of a dramatic individual experience, with all its specified ardors and intimacies, into the experience of a civilization and of our species. The transformations are stunning in their scope and scale. The eloquence and the depth of articulation are a source of constant joy." —Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry