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The Cradle Place [Click the title to buy this book] by Thomas Lux Houghton Mifflin 96 pages, $22.00 |
A cursory look at any of the eight full-length books of poetry that Thomas Lux has published since the early 1970s will yield an extraordinary array of subject matter. Crack a spine and you'll be confronted with an ode to the virgule, or to the limbic system, or a poem simply titled "Commercial Leech Farming Today," that is, refreshingly, about commercial leech farming today. Lux's latest collection, The Cradle Place, has poems devoted to national impalement statistics, to the ice worm, to the dung beetle. More impressive than the range of Lux's poetic feelers, however, is the way in which he distills these subjects into the original and striking metaphors that run through his disarming poems. Take, for instance, Lux's description of a gletz, the flaw inside a diamond, as "these breathless, cell-sized cells / where two inmates are locked / and each has a knife."
Charles Simic once described his own poems as being "a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph." Lux's poems feel a bit like this as well, loaded with macabre details picked up from the histories and biographies that he consumes. A prolific collector of facts, Lux works his findings into poems often accessible, usually witty, and almost always dark. Much of his imagery centers around dissolution and decay: a horse bleeds to death at full gallop; flies amass so thickly above a corpse-strewn battlefield that the surviving soldiers use flame-throwers to get through them. The birds in a recent Lux poem are nailed to trees. There is a poem for his daughter entitled "Can't Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me."