Thomas Lux Books
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an unsung masterReview Date: 2003-08-19
Rage and Rapture- the Poetry of Thomas LuxReview Date: 1997-10-06
Tom Lux is the best-kept secret in American Poetry.
Has reading poetry ever poetry frustrated you? Were you taught poetry is some kind of impressive sounding puzzle only a specialist could understand? Well, you must read "New and Selected Poems 1975-1995", because these poems will confound your experience with boring, academic or overly allusive verse. To "get" these poems, you won't need an overpaid theorist to explain them to you, all you need is your experience as an every-day human being.
It's the poet's job to bring the poems alive, make them clear, and engage the reader, and Lux does all this with verve. The subjects of the poems are wide ranging, (as skimming the above list of titles will reveal) but Lux never shallowly uses a subject for its shock value; all the poems honestly and intently explore. The diction is sharply focused, the metaphor surprising, and the sound harmonious and pleasant to read (yes you will actually enjoy saying the poems), but the key to Thomas Lux's poetry is the voice, the resonant from-your-chest, angry, needling, amused, serious, tender and wry voice.
But here I am, telling you what the poetry is like, not what why its valuable.
You should read this book, aloud and often: its music will please your mouth, the subjects will intrigue you, and the poems as poems, whole utterances, will make you feel very much alive.
RJ McCaffery
Watching a poet grow and mature...Review Date: 1997-12-28
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Anwar Sheikha, MDReview Date: 2003-03-03
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A RELOOK AT THE ORDINARYReview Date: 2000-11-16
You (as well as I) will be impressed with how the author takes ordinary things we see and experience in life and turns them into profound reflections. The ordinary is transformed into the extra-ordinary. His use of words calls us to attention of the familiar and demands that we move beyond the surface of what we see.
Shoveling snow, seedy motels, swingsets, donuts and shoveling snow are the varied themes covered in this volume. What in the world do these common place things have in common? Certainly they can't hold any meaning. Think so? Thomas Lux will put you to the challenge. He is serious, playful, introspective and playful in poking fun at human foilbles. Come along the poetic journey with him in the drowned river.
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De-LuxReview Date: 2008-04-01
This book was a pleasure to read (even my non-poem-friendly husband enjoyed hearing them read aloud) and I respect Lux for taking on such a risky topic as the size of God--therefore seeing us as the particles we truly are. It's sobering. Not all of the poems in the collection are about religion, but they are each weighty for their own purposes.
Lux sucessfully acheived discussing religon in poetry with this book, walking the tightrope between doubt and blind faith. He had his eyes wide open, and I think many readers will say the same once they have finished it.
The Biggest BangReview Date: 2008-05-06
In "God Particles" Lux tames his recent style with an infusion of surrealism and surreptitious theology. As a result, the poems have a degree of gravitas, a weight and mystery that his many readers have not previously seen, especially if they missed reading "The Blind Swimmer", a 1996 collection of early poems from 1970 to 1975. The poems in "The Blind Swimmer" are typical of their period, fashionably surrealistic, somewhat opaque and not always applied to important issues. Lux has turned sixty and the poems in "God Particles" marry the style of the early poems to the ultimate issues of human existence, love and mortality, social dissonance and war, the existence of God and the nature of the universe. It's a good match. Here is a brief love poem:
Early Blur
occurs, I say to Mary, when we catch the outline
of something and think we know it
and then we fill in the parts we don't see
with hope. I say this
to Mary, Mary of the late slant light of autumn,
Mary by the lake of the wolverines,
Mary by the lake beneath which drowned a wall,
Mary of the first snow, I say to Mary,
I say: I am the river
and you are its blue, burning current.
Other tender moments include his tribute to Peter Davison, the late editor of the Atlantic Monthly ("The Gentleman Who Spoke Like Music") and "Sugar Spoon", a song for his parents. There are poems about literature that say something about memory and our common end ("The General Law of Oblivion"), poems about human cruelty and the hunger of the sword, and lyrics about theology ("God Particles", "The Joy-Bringer"). There are poems that are humorous, silly and heartbreaking, sometimes all at once ("And The Mice Made Marriage All Night"); the range is extremely wide. It's a wonderful book, the kind we expect from a major poet.
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I carry this book with me everywhere!Review Date: 1999-07-20
The Clocks Are TickingReview Date: 2004-11-29
This volume took six years to write, and it shows in the repeated thrusts and mechanical coughs of the verse style. Contrary to previous reviewers, I did not find Lux's language always specific. Sometimes it seemed vague, as though he were trying to describe dreamlike experiences or states of feeling for which language does not suffice. Have you ever read the German poet Stefan George? Sometimes, or so it seems to this reviewer, George was born again in upstate New York or wherever it was and suffered through the typical milkman's son's life until he found Sarah Lawrence the way george found his Maximin. His writing is filled with violence, like "Rommel's Asparagus," the punji-like sticks which ripped the underbellies out of enemy pilots.
All in all, he should stop it with the long hair, that makes him looks like he was part of ABBA.
Take Your TimeReview Date: 2001-05-25
Vultures and liversReview Date: 2001-09-08
Describing his work, unfortunately, is more difficult than flinging around general superlatives. Often weird subject matter which nonetheless hooks into the same stuff we're all feeling: check. Unexpected vocabulary: check. But those features might be thought to equal only novelty (or at best a quirky vision appreciated only by a few isolated fellow nutcases) if it weren't for all the other stuff.
Other stuff. There's the voice, which you couldn't mistake in a thousand; in a period when an awful lot of poets sound an awful lot alike, Lux's voice is distinctive. (I'm not making this up.) That whole James-Wright-minor-melancholy tone that's so prevalent in folks coming out of workshops is absent in his poems, though it's not hard to see that Wright was an influence some way back. And there's the craft; Lux's line breaks are thought out in a way that too many poets' don't seem to be, and he manages formal verse as handily as free. (I think I'm quoting Lewis Turco when I remark that free verse isn't; and Lux knows it.) And there's the specificity which characterizes all good poets: to quote one of my favorites (from *Half-Promised Land*), "Yes!--it does, it does feel exactly fine/ crawling ashore, emptying the boots of water, and frankly/ here's to the clouds the color of bone,/ here's to the indecipherable path home,/ here's to the worm's sweat in the loam..."
See what I mean? That's sufficiently specific to crack your eardrum, with not an abstraction in the lot; and it is, believe it or not, formal verse (I read a Lux sestina without realizing what it was for at least four stanzas). And it's strange enough to make you laugh, a function which distracts you from noticing it's sufficiently (and simultaneously) poignant and celebratory to hook out your liver, a pang you notice just too late to forestall it. (Speaking of livers, there's a poem in *The Street of Clocks* with a lucky vulture in it. Now you know you can't pass that up.) And you can't imagine anyone else putting it just the way Lux does, but you know just what it means, and it makes you feel, in fact, at home. Right here. Seriously, folks, this stuff is good, and it's accessible, and people who hate poetry often like it anyhow. Buy it early and often.
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And he teaches poetry?Review Date: 2006-02-10
Maybe it's time to stop breathingReview Date: 2005-05-04
Dark, sad, squirrelyReview Date: 2005-05-04
4-star review for a 5-star poetReview Date: 2006-08-20
Unfortunately, the poems that I just named are not ones that appear in this particular collection. I am always glad to see a new collection by Lux, for I know that the situations of his poems are going to continually surprise me, whether they are horses who die mid-gallop or mummies about to be ground into powder for other uses. But a few poems in here fail to reach those human conclusions that really mark Lux's best work. At one point, we find the speaker of a poem chastising himself for the kind of historical obsession Lux himself has shown in his poems, but this conclusion is unsatisfying and seems almost the work of a novice, which Lux is not.
A marvellous poem in this collection is "To Help the Monkey Cross the River," which in the end produces a hypothetical choice as wise and as wide as implication as Ginger or MaryAnn?, or Steak or Shrimp? This poem is a fine example of the pure genius of Lux, but these examples are more scant in this book.
I still look forward to the next Lux collection but am not fully satisfied with this particular production.
some good work, not his bestReview Date: 2004-07-28
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