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Title: The Cradle Place : Poems by Thomas Lux ISBN: 0-618-42830-5 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Pub. Date: 11 March, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Primordial milk
Comment: Most of what I can say about *The Cradle Place* will sound too much like what I said about *Street of Clocks*, but it's still true: this is one good poet, and this is another good book. If you haven't read Lux before, go look at *The Street of Clocks* for my sprawling encomia on the Lux oeuvre. Specific and concrete of detail, distinctive and musical of voice, celebratory and humorous and really funny: all of the above still apply.
So how (I hear you cry) is *The Cradle Place* different? Well, I think I'm detecting an increasing trend toward what I'd call allegory if "allegory" weren't so unfashionable a term at the moment. "Professor of Ants", "Asafetida", "The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association"-these have pretty clear more-than-metaphorical implications.
And I see, or imagine I see, a deepening dark streak, more of a "gletz", if you like: that "breathless, cell-sized cell/where two inmates are locked/and each has a knife." Of course, calling Lux's poems dark at this late date may sound funny, considering that the author was writing about leech farming seven or eight years back; but when my husband prised my head out of the book to ask how it was looking, my first-blush response was "these are not happy poems." In retrospect some of them seem more so--the final poem, which already made my day when it appeared in APR, is very lively, and it's good to think that out of the magma chambers the heart spews into the world we can make "a new republic of hope." But we are seeing, this time, a can of alphabet soup full of "little noodle swastikas" (if I'd been planning to ever eat alphabet soup again, I wouldn't be now.) The birds here are nailed to trees in museums, waiting to be picked off by mummified boys with pellet guns. The poet acknowledges that if we value our necks, there are times when we'll "shut the f--- up", that our bones are owned by something else, and that he wants to "whack-smack" the One Afraid to Be Seen. And call me a sentimental putz, but I hate it when even my favorite authors behead bees, ironically or no, and the Dobyns-esque worldview that might see the bee as having no existence outside of perception and allegory and words doesn't exactly warm the cockles of my hard but animistic heart. So, yeah, there are indeed "Scorpions Everywhere" here. One of the epigraphs is Roethke's cry for "the old rage, the lash of primordial milk", and I expect it's here.
Still, I think you, gentle Reader, should read the book. After all, there are a whole lot of scorpions out there (albeit probably not masquerading as squirrels), and it doesn't make the world any worse to look at them, and plant even on them "as many kisses as the world will bear."
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Title: New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux : 1975-1995 by Thomas Lux ISBN: 039592488X Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 17 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: What Narcissism Means to Me : Poems by Tony Hoagland ISBN: 1555973868 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Insomnia Diary (PITT POETRY SERIES) by Bob Hicok ISBN: 0822958422 Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright ISBN: 0375415181 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews by William Matthews, Sebastian Matthews, Stanley Plumly ISBN: 0618350071 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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