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
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George Franklin spent his youth studying (mostly Western) literature at Harvard, Brown, and Columbia, and his middle years studying (mostly Eastern) spiritual traditions in the United States and abroad. Throughout his life, he wrote constantly, primarily poetry, but deeply averse to self-promotion, published only intermittently. Although subject to bouts of severe depression, he had long periods of joyful engagement with the world around him and with a wide circle of friends and family. Gay but largely celibate for the sake of his spiritual practice, he never married. During his final years, suffering from multiple debilitating illnesses that consigned him to a nursing home, he rose daily before dawn to produce a series of astonishingly virtuosic books of poetry, memoir and literary criticism. He died at the age of 71, leaving behind a triumphant legacy in the form of his writing.