Synopses & Reviews
The Cradle Place is the new collection from Thomas Lux, a self-described "recovering surrealist" and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.
These fifty-two poems bring to full life the "refreshing iconoclasms" Rita Dove so admired in Lux's earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, humorous and edgy, and ever surprising.
These are philosophical poems that ask questions about language and intention, about the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. In the poem "Terminal Lake," Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark currents beneath the surface: "it's a huge black coin, / it's as if the real lake is drained / and this lake is the drain: gaping, language- / less, suck- and sinkhole." In the ominous "Render, Render," the narrator asks us to consider a concentration of the essences of our lives: all that is physical, spiritual, remembered, and dreamed for, melded together to make the messy self we present to the world.
Lux's voice is intelligent without being bookish, urgent and unrelentingly evocative. He has long been a strong advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture. The Los Angeles Times praises Lux for his "compelling rhythms, his biting irony, and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless." As Sven Birkerts noted, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends."
Review
"singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion." Publishers Weekly
Whole worlds of possibility and exchange . . . Lux's most ambitious poems mix rage and rapture." The Chicago Tribune
Review
"singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion." Publishers Weekly
Review
"This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate (My Noiseless Entourage) departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades--but it could just be his best book." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
Synopsis
In Child Made of Sand, Kingsley Tufts-winner Thomas Lux demonstrates a restless energy to explore new territory while confirming his place in the pantheon of contemporary American poetry.
Synopsis
Readers familiar with Thomas Luxs quick-witted images ("Language without simile is like a lung/ without air") and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers") will find in his new collection, Child Made of Sand, not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of Americas most inventive and humane poets, but they will also find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "West Shining Tree," we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "Ill head dead West and ask of all I see:/ Which is the way, the long or the short way,/ to the West Shining Tree?"
Synopsis
The Street of Clocks, Thomas Lux's first all-new collection since 1994, is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. The poems gathered here are delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against vivid landscapes - the rural America of Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border - these poems speak from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea.
Synopsis
"[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time." Stanley Kunitz
Thomas Lux is humorous, edgy, and ever surprising in The Cradle Place, his tenth collection of verse. These fifty-two poems question language and intention and the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. Lux has long been an outspoken advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture, and his voice is urgent and unrelentingly evocative. As Sven Birkerts has noted, Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends.”
A book full of arresting images . . . The natural world, as it appears here, is at first lovely . . . but turns out dangerously vanquished . . . Not since Plath has hysteria looked this kissable." San Francisco Chronicle
Lux has a gift for the swiftly turned expression . . . Such immediacy and quirkiness will hold a reader." Poetry
"Readers will be mesmerized." Poetry Book of the Year, Library Journal
THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the 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.
Synopsis
God Particles displays the distinctive originality and unpredictability that prompted the Washington Post Book World to name Lux one of this generations most gifted poets. A satiric edge, tempered by profound compassion, cuts through many of the poems in Luxs book. While themes of intolerance, inhumanity, loss, and a deep sense of mortality mark these poems, a lighthearted grace instills even the somberest moments with unexpected sweetness. In the title poem Lux writes, theres no reason for God to feel guilt / I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore . . . / He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch . . . / to have a tiny piece of Him / though we are unqualified, / of even the crumb of a crumb.” Dark, humorous, and strikingly imaginative, this is Luxs most compassionate work to date.
Synopsis
One of the New York Public Library's 25 "Books to Remember" in 1997 Lux comments on the absurd, the pathetic, and the commonplace in our culture, writing with compassion as well as satire. He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion," says Publishers Weekly, and Robert Hass, in the Washington Post Book World, takes special note of Lux's "bitter wit, the kind of irony that comes with a quick, impatient intelligence."
Synopsis
Thomas Lux's poems embody the sound of deep emotions lightly carried. In their deft, sometimes humorous fashion they unseat the spirit, fastening on the rueful and mysterious poignancies of our lives, like that unopened bottle of maraschino cherries abandoned in the refrigerator, or cocking a snook at the dreadful challenges of commercial leech farming today. For the past twenty-five years, Lux's work has grown from his early experiments in surrealism into a body of work that, while challenging the mind and affecting the funnybone, is designed to touch the heart, a destination Lux attains with the utmost precision and delicacy. This book for the first time brings together in one volume the best of his mature work.
Synopsis
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."
Synopsis
A new collection of poems by the recent Poet Laureate.
Synopsis
In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam & Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky.
About the Author
CHARLES SIMIC was born in Belgrade and emigrated to the United States in 1954. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. Among other honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007-2008.
Table of Contents
I
The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears 3
The Little Three-Handed Engine That Could 4
The Chairman of Naught 6
You and Your Ilk 7
The Drunken Forest 8
The Underappreciated Pontooniers 9
Nietzsche Throws His Arms Around the Neck of a Dray Horse 10
Scriptus Interruptus 11
A Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes 12
The Queen of Truth 13
A Delivery of Dung 14
II
Elegy 19
Since Death and Its Sequelae 20
Every Time Someone Masturbates God Kills a Kitten 22
West Shining Tree 23
From Whom All Blessings Flow 24
The Probabilist 26
Rue de la Vieille Lanterne 27
Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding down
Your Throat (A Belgian Euphemism) 28
Not the Same Kind of Mud as in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” 30
Ermine Noose 31
Why 32
III
Madsong 35
The Riverine Farmers 36
The Anti-Lunarian League 38
Penultimatum 39
Boy Born with Small Knife in His Head 40
Graves Rented by the Hour 41
Dendrochronologist Blues 42
The Goldfish Room (Where the Cops
Beat You in the Head with a Phonebook) 44
The River of Nuts 46
Baby Madsong 48
IV
Hatrack 51
Fishing 52
Soup Teachers, 54
The Hunchback Farmhand 55
Ladys Slipper 56
Bricks Sinking in Deep Water 57
Dead Horse 58
Fox 60
A Walk in the Woods with Shotguns 62
Outline for My Memoir 64