The poems gathered in THE STREET OF CLOCKS are lyrical monologues urgently delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against a vivid landscape--the rural America of Thomas Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border--these poems speak with mesmerizing intensity from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea. They address the snakes, parrots, or sand fleas living there, as well as their human cohabitants, who are sometimes benign, as in the beautiful title poem ("Meet me there, you remember, the corner / of Paris and Porter"), and sometimes emphatically not so. The language is distilled and musical, lucid and strange, playful and dead serious, and always specific. Thomas Lux's first all-new volume in seven years is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. As Sven Birkerts has written, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends. He has the stuff to win readers back from their unhappy places of exile."

Thomas Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Contents

Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires 1

The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball 2

Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City 3

Bonehead 4

Beauty School 5

In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room 6

So We Can See the Snakes Coming 7

Thomas the Broken-Mouthed 8

The Handsome Swamp 9

The Blister Test 10

From Grade School Window, Watching Local Bookie Arrested 11

Grain Burning Far Away 12

The Doldrum Fracture Zone 13

The Nerve Doctors 14

The Poison Shirt 15

The Road That Runs Beside the River 16

A Kiss 17

A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire, 18

Shotgun Loaded with Rock Salt 20

Slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus) 21

Pre-Cerebral 22

Salve 23

Jungleside 24

Regarding (Most) Songs 25

A Voiceless Parrot Learns to Read and Write and Play the Trumpet 26

Beggar's Bowl Stolen 27

A Man Gets Off Work Early 28

Baby, Still Crying, Swallowed by a Snake 29

Rommel's Asparagus 30

Plastic Castle in Goldfish Bowl 31

Stubblefield Dusted with Snow 32

The Downslope Winds 33

A Library of Skulls 34

Marine Snow at Mid-Depths and Down 36

An Erg 37

The War of Jenkins's Ear (1739–1741) 38

Lucky 39

The Fish-Strewn Fields 40

Shoreless 41

Unlike, for Example, the Sound of a Riptooth Saw 42

Cordon Sanitaire 43

Henry Clay's Mouth 44

The Language Animal 45

Pencil Box Shaped Like a Gun 46

The Corner of Paris and Porter 48

The Bandage Factory 50

Notes 51