The Street of Clocks

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."

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A collection of poems, often set against a landscape of rural America or places south of the border, speaks from rivers, swamps, deserts, lawns, jungles, and the sea and addresses animals and humans living there.

Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires

The high-tension spires spike the sky beneath which boys bend to pick from prickly vines the deep-sopped fruit, the rind’s green a green sunk in green. They part the plants’ leaves, reach into the nest, and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.
The smaller yellow-green children stay, for now. The fruit goes in baskets by the side of the row, every thirty feet or so. By these bushels the boys get paid, in cash, at day’s end, this summer of the last days of the empire that will become known as the past, adios, then, the ragged-edged beautiful blink.

Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Lux

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.

Mixing shock and tenderness in ways Lux fans have long loved, this new full-length work arrives six years after New and Selected Poems 1975-1995, and should enjoy a similarly warm reception. "Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires" envisions the vegetables as uneasy families, with "smaller yellow-green children" orphaned when the cukes are picked; "Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City" finds "his sister, Mathilde" trailing "little Tommy" as they fly through the heavens "just as she did on earth." Instinctive fear of snakes, "Henry Clay's Mouth," the anti-saint called "Thomas the Broken-Mouthed," a local bookie, wheat fields on fire, orange roughy, "prolific squid" and a "Shotgun Loaded with Rock Salt" all appear in one or another of these broken-lined, sadder-but-wiser poems some constructed around embittered stories, others around a single, titular image. Lux's titles and premises can seem more inventive than the poems he spins out from them: some seem to sacrifice intellect for charm. Moreover, Lux's anecdotal method and his gallows humor (both indebted to dedicatee Stephen Dobyns) can grow old by the end of the book, as when a baby "swallowed by a snake" prompts the poet to croon "bye-bye baby." (Apr.) Forecast: Lux, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, is a perennial finalist for prestigious awards; his semipopulist, semisurrealist project places him in the same ballpark, stylistically, as the big-selling Billy Collins, and he already has some following among younger readers. Genuine popularity may still prove elusive, however, without a reading on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion or the like. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.