New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 - Hardcover

Lux, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395858321 ISBN 13: 9780395858325

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

The author of the Kingsley-Tufts award-winning Split Horizon presents new and favorite poems about such topics as the challenges of commercial leech farming and cocking a snook.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

Lux (e.g., The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, LJ 12/96) has been writing for over 20 years, and many phases of his 20-year writing career are represented in this intriguing collection. His style is deceptively essayistic and even prosy, and while at times his efforts fall into banality, many poems here are distinctive and outstanding. Lux has a notable gift for discerning the difficult and unchanging questions, and his best work offers the illumination and surprise of first-rate writing. In "Solo Native," he sees the human being as "a metaphor, a meatpacker,/ a tree dropping or gaining its credentials." Notable also are the compassionate tributes to Keats, Alexander Pope, and other past poets, the finest of which is perhaps "Postcard to Baudelaire." At times Lux is also capable of superb turns in strict form, as in "All the Slaves" or "Man Asleep in a Child's Bed." At times, as in "Spiders Wanting," he matches that spider's achievement: "to design/ the web, live on what we catch/ from air, and always returning,/ always, to the spun eluctable cave." For most collections of contemporary poetry.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
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Lux looks at the overlooked in the world--the jar of maraschino cherries that no one seems to use, "The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently," the near-futility of an old man shoveling snow. With humor, minimalist phrasing, and devotion to everyday language, Lux comments on oddities and trivialities. Reading from cover to cover, one can certainly trace changes in Lux's style, especially by 1986, when he developed lyric and narrative strength and showed an awareness of, and even reverence for, poetry's traditions. Lux also acquired wisdom about what forms work best for him, such as prayers/incantations, nursery rhymes, and near-monologues. Though the poems from The Drowned River (1990) lack resonance and the graceful wit of his earlier work, Lux regains some freshness of vision in the poems from his last collection, Split Horizon (1994). In New and Selected, Lux proves that he is a biographer of the ordinary, and perhaps because of that, a chronicler of our times. Janet St. John

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395858321
• ISBN 13: 9780395858325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177