by Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by David Sewell
Just in Time!
Within mere minutes of being handed this book by Coldfront’s own hyacinth boy and squirreling it in my man-style tote bag for safekeeping, things in my life started to fall apart. Common sense may argue that it is I and, more particularly, my puff adder of a mouth that’s responsible for all of my problems, but I’m not ready to let Thomas Lux off the hook yet.
“God knows, / there’s no reason for God to feel guilt,” the title poem sashays. Well, duh. I was saying that Lux may be to blame, not God. Anyway. “I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore, or vengeful, / or forgiving, and He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch / and are touched by, / to have a tiny piece of Him, / though we are unqualified / for even a crumb of a crumb.”
So, yes, it would seem then that God is not the one to hang the seagull necklace on—I mean, he tried, creating me from some old dust, giving me a good go at it on my own. Even after he threw in the towel, with the blowing himself up and the precipitating the particles and everything. He tried. His conscience is clear. But it was just too late. I was busy touching those around me with Sewell particles, instead of God particles (which, as I’ve noted, were in my in-no-way-feminine tote, yet unread), and that has made all the difference. The “tender rain of Him” falling “on every cow, ladle, leaf, human, ax handle, swing set” had not come soon enough for some of us swing sets. As Lux says, we are unqualified for His particles. And Sewell particles are simply not good enough for girls with page-boy haircuts. It is not how He wanted it to be; it is how it is.
Speaking of which, I sometimes think it’s a good idea that they don’t let cars drive on the sidewalk. At any rate, in the interests of aversion therapy, I will now attempt something like a review of this book, even though it may very well curse to damnation anyone who grasps it, which you may want to keep in mind when considering a purchase. I’m not saying that, without a doubt, it will ruin your life to be within cat-swinging distance of this slim volume, but I do think caution is key in situations such as this. One must be so careful these days.
Unfortunately, the darkly bright and sprite Lux of books past, the Lux who seems to live in another world entirely, has been too much in our soiled cities of petty jealousies and violent skirmishes to be as much fun as we may want. There are still flashes of the old brilliance here and there. The first section doesn’t disappoint in this regard. “Peacocks in Twilight,” for example, lives in that Tate/Knott/Edson nexus that amazes in ways delightful and disturbing. After telling us of his plans to shoot said peacocks in twilight with his father’s gun, he adds, “Daddy didn’t like peacocks / in twilight either, they offended / an iron aesthetic of his, something to do / with loathing cheap beauty, the meretricious, which I must have inherited, / or else I love to hear and see / the peahens weep.”
“Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care” is strange and fun and from a place that only Lux and a few others seem able to plumb with consistent results. Various dead or dying (one presumes) people—Black Care, Slit Throat, Nipple Cancer, et al.—are all riding, stacked on each other’s shoulders and such, on the chevalier’s horse, to death, or hell, or somewhere dark. But the Horseman “prefers none of this.” He “desires a doorway, / a cave’s mouth, a clothesline—or best: a low, hard, / garrotey branch.”
File that poem and “Her Hat, That Party on Her Head,” with its fine balance of silliness and resonance (the woman with the “birthday party on her head” is pacing aimlessly, in apparent pain over a loss), and most of the other poems in the first section next to the Lux poems everyone knows and loves. These are poems of a beguiling and belying clarity and a practiced ease of language, sometimes annoyingly novel (“Hitler’s Slippers”) and sometimes asking one too many dances of an extended metaphor (“The Lead Hour,” “The Pier Aspiring”), but altogether delightful in their revealing of a highly personal and individual world and a wonderfully adept and talented tour guide.
In Act 2 of three, Lux seems to have been loosed on the moor, where he wanders aimlessly, excoriating wildly and shaking a cold fist hither and thither. Our God from the title poem may be too tired and old to be angry anymore, but age seems to be having an opposite effect on Lux. And, unfortunately, anger, as of most men, is unbecoming of him. One sees this ire mostly aimed at those who would use God’s name to blow something/someone up. Fair enough. But Lux here is less the poet than the cable news hector. “Their Feet Shall Slide in Due Time” soberly finds solace in Deuteronomy’s promise that “the wicked, the venal, / shall face a steep, greasy hill whose fortress / they cannot take,” where inevitably they’ll lose their footing and fall. “Invective,” on the other hand, wishes some special someone “boils, pocks, and blisters.” Lux prays that “your son wish to be a poet” and “your wife fucks you / in the ass,” and, finally, that “your next breath, / and each one thereafter, fills your lungs / with the stink of your corpse.”
Lux rails against the consumerization of Christ (or relics, at least; “Jesus’ Baby Teeth”) and informs us that, though he did behead his neighbor’s ceramic duck, “a book / did not tell me I had the right to do so, / nor did I hear a voice, / a promise, from a pearly place.” As the poem “5,495″ chides us, Jesus was, apparently, whipped 5,495 times. For comparison’s sake, “A Jew on the way to the gas chamber didn’t (collectively / is another story), nor did he carry / the gas chamber on his back / to the chamber site.” The poem ends, “every day in your name, and/or your father’s, or / some other god’s, God forgive me.” God, yes; Apollo, maybe not.
This my-god-can-do-more-pushups-than-your-god stuff is tiresome (“Certainly my god / can rip the heart from your god’s chest” is maybe meant sarcastically, is maybe in someone else’s mouth, but still…) and not particularly well served by a poetic setting, nor does poetry benefit much from having it as a subject matter. This section of religion/God-tinged poems pulls a few other monkeys out of its hat, but they mostly beat the same diminutive tin cymbals over and over again. There is a bit of freshness here, too, but if you really want to know more about the poem that imagines some Amish marauders murdering a drunken Quaker, you will have to risk curse and damnation and pick up the book for yourself.
The third section is underwhelming, too, but for different, less-jingo-jangly reasons. At times it feels like the good poems went in the first section, the God poems in the second, and the less-good everything else in the third. “Mole Emerging from Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916″ is perhaps the best of the section, and it shows that temporal distance serves Lux better than trying to deal with contemporary issues, such as the very current problem of religiously motivated terrorism. “Toad on a Golf Tee” explores just what the title portends and proves that, though a poem can be written about most anything, maybe not always a worthwhile one.
There are several cases where Lux seems to be pointing at poets and poetry he doesn’t like, often in a sarcastic kind of way. From “Vaticide”: “The murder (metaphorical) of poets, / is not such a bad idea in some cases.” It’s probably best not to think too much of this, but that three or so poems deal with Lux’s feelings for other poets paints the poor man’s Fabio in a somewhat cranky light. Ditto the couple or so poems that praise the act of reading and libraries—preaching to the choir, perhaps, and, as with the poems against certain poets/poetry, time spent somewhat profligately.
In the end, it’s only about one-half of the book that hits the sweet spot. I admire that Lux has the courage to take things to places he doesn’t always go, it’s just that some of these poems might have been better kept in his private reserve. Then again, it’s been recently proven that I should just stop talking, and maybe that I should have never started. So, as with many good poets, bad or less-good Lux is not bad poetry, it’s just a reminder of what we miss in a person we’ve come to know and like. As for bad Sewells, well, as Lux once wrote, love is “all sore and dumb / and dangerous.” Sewells sometimes too.
“I find it hard to write even today about this tremendous beast,” Indran Amirthanayagam writes in the preface to The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, referring to the 2004 natural disaster that took the lives of over 225,000 victims in southeast Asia. On December 26, 2004, the day that his country of birth, Sri Lanka, “lost half its face,” he was consumed by a desire to “write that face back.”
It is not often that a “new and selected” documents the progressions, departures, and returns of a writer’s consciousness as lucidly and profoundly as Paul Zimmer’s Crossing to Sunlight Revisited (the long-awaited sequel to 1996’s Crossing to Sunlight: Selected Poems). Zimmer’s newer poems are at the start of the book; they chronicle his ascension into, what seems to be, comfortable old age. Note that “old” is not my word here; in fact, in his preface, Zimmer informs us that he is “no longer an aging poet or an older poet.” He says, “I am an old poet.” 
Like plums? Good, so do I. You might like them even better as metaphor:
As if the photograph on the cover wasn’t enough to scare me, Seidel’s opening poem in his latest—Ooga-Booga—is titled “Kill Poem.” All right, my hopes weren’t high, but as I started to read the poem, I got into it. I’m a sucker for animals or “the animal,” which, I think, is a befitting title for Seidel, and “Kill Poem” is certainly packed with the animalistic: “of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.” So, it’s a hunting poem?
Bill Zavatsky is an excellent bench player for the New York School, and one of the strong points of Hanging Loose’s team. Left-handed as that is, I mean it as a compliment. Can we say for sure where the ’96 Yankees have wound up if Charlie Hayes had flubbed that ninth-inning pop-up? Where would Earl Weaver’s Orioles have been without John Lowenstein, or the mid-80’s Mets without Rusty Staub? OK, don’t answer that last one. Zavatsky’s strength is the hard-earned knowledge of second-stringers gained from his ten years as a jazz pianist playing in obscure clubs.