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To The Left Of Time
A brilliant new collection of poems by Kingsley Tufts Award–winning poet Thomas Lux
With To the Left of Time, Thomas Lux adds more than fifty new poems to his celebrated oeuvre. Broken into three sections, these include semi-autobiographical poems, odes, and a final section that delves into a variety of subjects reflective of Lux’s imaginative range. Full of his characteristic satire and humor, this new collection promises laughter and profound insight into the human condition.
To the Left of Time is a powerful addition to the work of one who has been widely praised for his ability to offer image- and metaphor-driven visions as well as lines of plain language and immediacy. This collection proves that Lux’s work will continue to inspire readers for decades to come.
With To the Left of Time, Thomas Lux adds more than fifty new poems to his celebrated oeuvre. Broken into three sections, these include semi-autobiographical poems, odes, and a final section that delves into a variety of subjects reflective of Lux’s imaginative range. Full of his characteristic satire and humor, this new collection promises laughter and profound insight into the human condition.
To the Left of Time is a powerful addition to the work of one who has been widely praised for his ability to offer image- and metaphor-driven visions as well as lines of plain language and immediacy. This collection proves that Lux’s work will continue to inspire readers for decades to come.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2016
9 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Lux
86 books23 followersAcclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry has gradually evolved towards a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Often using ironic or sardonic speakers, startlingly apt imagery, careful rhythms, and reaching into history for subject matter, Lux has created a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. Lux is vocal about the tendency in contemporary poetry to confuse “difficulty” with “originality.” In an interview with Cerise Press, Lux stated: “There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.” Known for pairing humor with sharp existentialism, Lux commented in the Los Angeles Times, "I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor."
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1946 to working class parents, Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. Lux’s first collections, including Memory’s Handgrenade and Sunday: Poems (1979), were grounded in the Neo-Surrealist techniques of contemporaries like James Tate and Bill Knott. Contemporary Poets contributor Richard Damashek wrote that Lux’s early work was "intensely personal…tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world." Such early Lux’s poems were often portraits of a “solo native…always strange to the world," observed Elizabeth Macklin in Parnassus, "always on the verge of extradition, always beset with allergies to the native element, 'like a simple vase not tolerating water.'" With Half Promised Land (1986), Lux began the turn that characterizes much of his later work. The book foregoes many of the surrealist techniques of Sunday and focuses instead on an increasingly careful and accurate depiction of the real world. In later books like The Drowned River (1990) and the Kingsley-Tufts award winning Split Horizon (1994), Lux utilizes a conversational tone to describe what one reviewer called the “invisible millions” populating the poems. Describing his own progress in an interview with the Cortland Review, he said: “I kind of drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I got better and better, I believe, at the craft. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me. I started looking outside of myself a lot more for subjects. I read a great deal of history, turned more outward as opposed to inward.”
Lux’s other collections include New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (1997), The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004) and God Particles (2008), a collection Elizabeth Hoover described as “lucid and morally urgent” in the Los Angeles Times. Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence for over twenty years and is affiliated with the Warren Wilson MFA program; currently the Bourne chair in poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is a renowned teacher. In the Cortland Review interview, he described teaching’s greatest rewards: “you see people get excited by poetry. You see their lives changed by poetry. You see someone beginning to learn how to articulate and express themselves in this very tight art form, in this very distilled manner. You see all sorts and hear all sorts of really human stuff, really human business.” His many awards and honors include the Kinglsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fel
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1946 to working class parents, Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. Lux’s first collections, including Memory’s Handgrenade and Sunday: Poems (1979), were grounded in the Neo-Surrealist techniques of contemporaries like James Tate and Bill Knott. Contemporary Poets contributor Richard Damashek wrote that Lux’s early work was "intensely personal…tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world." Such early Lux’s poems were often portraits of a “solo native…always strange to the world," observed Elizabeth Macklin in Parnassus, "always on the verge of extradition, always beset with allergies to the native element, 'like a simple vase not tolerating water.'" With Half Promised Land (1986), Lux began the turn that characterizes much of his later work. The book foregoes many of the surrealist techniques of Sunday and focuses instead on an increasingly careful and accurate depiction of the real world. In later books like The Drowned River (1990) and the Kingsley-Tufts award winning Split Horizon (1994), Lux utilizes a conversational tone to describe what one reviewer called the “invisible millions” populating the poems. Describing his own progress in an interview with the Cortland Review, he said: “I kind of drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I got better and better, I believe, at the craft. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me. I started looking outside of myself a lot more for subjects. I read a great deal of history, turned more outward as opposed to inward.”
Lux’s other collections include New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (1997), The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004) and God Particles (2008), a collection Elizabeth Hoover described as “lucid and morally urgent” in the Los Angeles Times. Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence for over twenty years and is affiliated with the Warren Wilson MFA program; currently the Bourne chair in poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is a renowned teacher. In the Cortland Review interview, he described teaching’s greatest rewards: “you see people get excited by poetry. You see their lives changed by poetry. You see someone beginning to learn how to articulate and express themselves in this very tight art form, in this very distilled manner. You see all sorts and hear all sorts of really human stuff, really human business.” His many awards and honors include the Kinglsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fel
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 22, 2017
Dear Thomas Lux,
When I heard that you'd recently passed away, I was saddened, and sorry that I had never managed to find the time to review this collection while you were still with us. I wasn't familiar with your work when I won To the Left of Time in an Instagram giveaway, and the truth is I wasn't too sure about it at first: Very early on, one of your narrators shoots and kills a bird on purpose. I don't usually read poetry where animals die and nobody is that upset about it. But I persevered, and soon I was quite taken with your whimsical, humorous, and ultimately sweet voice, like an edgier Billy Collins. That poem about the gum on the sidewalk? I still think about that one all the time and smile. Yes, we had a shaky introduction, but I ended up being very glad we met. Thank you to the publisher for this free copy. And thank you, Thomas Lux, for this great reading experience. I hope you left this world knowing you made a lot of people smile. Rest in peace.
When I heard that you'd recently passed away, I was saddened, and sorry that I had never managed to find the time to review this collection while you were still with us. I wasn't familiar with your work when I won To the Left of Time in an Instagram giveaway, and the truth is I wasn't too sure about it at first: Very early on, one of your narrators shoots and kills a bird on purpose. I don't usually read poetry where animals die and nobody is that upset about it. But I persevered, and soon I was quite taken with your whimsical, humorous, and ultimately sweet voice, like an edgier Billy Collins. That poem about the gum on the sidewalk? I still think about that one all the time and smile. Yes, we had a shaky introduction, but I ended up being very glad we met. Thank you to the publisher for this free copy. And thank you, Thomas Lux, for this great reading experience. I hope you left this world knowing you made a lot of people smile. Rest in peace.
June 18, 2017
It's a sad fact of life that we readers stumble upon some writers only because their deaths make news. Such was the case with Thomas Lux, who died this past year, and who must be a big-shot poet because any time the font of an author's name is larger than the title on a book's cover, you're dealing with a known entity whose name sells.
What's more, Lux has a cool name. How many of us have met a man named "Lux" (his name means "light" in the Dead Language, which also became famous after it died). Appropriate, given that Lux's poems show a light touch.
Lux is a one-stanza, free-verse kind of guy. In fact, every poem in the book is a singular block stanza, so if you're enamored of couplets or tercets or quatrains, you can apply elsewhere. Unlike most free verse-types, however, Lux slips in more rhyming than most. They appear arbitrarily, usually but not always at the end of lines. For instance, here are some end-rhymes from the poem "Manure Pile Covered in Snow":
It was labor--and my father said
to do it--to be done.
Aesthetics? I had none.
So: I ruined a pristine mound
of snow. A mound so symmetrical, so round,
it seem a Half-Sphere from the Spheres,
or perhaps a sky god's giant tear..."
And so on. As evidenced by the manure pile, Lux likes rural topics, bringing him into my reading wheelhouse for sure. In the Ode section (section two of three), he even writes an "Ode to Lichen," for godssakes. How admirable is THAT?
Lux has a sardonic sense of humor, that's for sure. Some of the ode titles serve nicely as evidence: "Ode to the Eating Establishment Where the Utensils Were Chained to the Table," "Ode While Awaiting Execution," "Ode to the Electric Fish That Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish," "Ode to Chronic Insolvency," "Ode to the Fat Child Who Went First onto the Thin Ice," and "Ode to the Archipelagoes of Discarded Chewing Gum on Sidewalks."
Breezy, but the type of breezy that requires rereading--the hallmark of good poetry, I think.
What's more, Lux has a cool name. How many of us have met a man named "Lux" (his name means "light" in the Dead Language, which also became famous after it died). Appropriate, given that Lux's poems show a light touch.
Lux is a one-stanza, free-verse kind of guy. In fact, every poem in the book is a singular block stanza, so if you're enamored of couplets or tercets or quatrains, you can apply elsewhere. Unlike most free verse-types, however, Lux slips in more rhyming than most. They appear arbitrarily, usually but not always at the end of lines. For instance, here are some end-rhymes from the poem "Manure Pile Covered in Snow":
It was labor--and my father said
to do it--to be done.
Aesthetics? I had none.
So: I ruined a pristine mound
of snow. A mound so symmetrical, so round,
it seem a Half-Sphere from the Spheres,
or perhaps a sky god's giant tear..."
And so on. As evidenced by the manure pile, Lux likes rural topics, bringing him into my reading wheelhouse for sure. In the Ode section (section two of three), he even writes an "Ode to Lichen," for godssakes. How admirable is THAT?
Lux has a sardonic sense of humor, that's for sure. Some of the ode titles serve nicely as evidence: "Ode to the Eating Establishment Where the Utensils Were Chained to the Table," "Ode While Awaiting Execution," "Ode to the Electric Fish That Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish," "Ode to Chronic Insolvency," "Ode to the Fat Child Who Went First onto the Thin Ice," and "Ode to the Archipelagoes of Discarded Chewing Gum on Sidewalks."
Breezy, but the type of breezy that requires rereading--the hallmark of good poetry, I think.
February 6, 2019
ODE TO THE FIRE HYDRANT
Who has not wanted to tip his hat
to the big lug-nut top hat it wears?
Unless you were impelled to paint them
through a long summer to repay
a societal debt, and had also a boss with a quota
of hydrants and asses to kick.
As an artist, I could not create under such conditions!
There was never the right north light.
The brushes were cheap and left bristles in my work,
which I did not intend. On a few, as symbols
of oppression, in the right-by-accident place,
they edified and were, therefore, intentional.
Because of these and other compromises,
I refused to sign
my art, with one exception: the hydrant
in front of my grammar school,
which would have burned down without it
in a fire I started.
I trimmed a little tuft of grass
(we were issued a pair of shears)
and writ my initials with the corner of a brush,
using the last few drops of red paint from a state paint can
during the summer I was asked many times
why I was covered with blood.
ODE ELABORATING ON THE OBVIOUS
It’s a miraculous apparatus, consciousness,
even blinking off and on, even on a mattress
as proto-coffin. I ate the pudding once
from a plastic tray of lunch
a kind nurse served my father. He didn’t
want to eat it, or anything.
A friend wrote that he found Jesus.
A friend wrote that his wife is dying.
The friend who found Jesus wrote again
that he lost Jesus: He was just here, now He’s not.
My friend whose wife is dying did not write
to say his wife is not dying.
Here’s a nice sound—if they’re two leafy blocks
over at the schoolyard: children.
This is something I like to look at: thick yellow brushstrokes.
I love to whiff winter’s cilantro snows.
The taste of chokecherry’s bitter breaking on my tongue.
I loved to touch my child’s forehead
for fever and the feeling of finding none.
Who has not wanted to tip his hat
to the big lug-nut top hat it wears?
Unless you were impelled to paint them
through a long summer to repay
a societal debt, and had also a boss with a quota
of hydrants and asses to kick.
As an artist, I could not create under such conditions!
There was never the right north light.
The brushes were cheap and left bristles in my work,
which I did not intend. On a few, as symbols
of oppression, in the right-by-accident place,
they edified and were, therefore, intentional.
Because of these and other compromises,
I refused to sign
my art, with one exception: the hydrant
in front of my grammar school,
which would have burned down without it
in a fire I started.
I trimmed a little tuft of grass
(we were issued a pair of shears)
and writ my initials with the corner of a brush,
using the last few drops of red paint from a state paint can
during the summer I was asked many times
why I was covered with blood.
ODE ELABORATING ON THE OBVIOUS
It’s a miraculous apparatus, consciousness,
even blinking off and on, even on a mattress
as proto-coffin. I ate the pudding once
from a plastic tray of lunch
a kind nurse served my father. He didn’t
want to eat it, or anything.
A friend wrote that he found Jesus.
A friend wrote that his wife is dying.
The friend who found Jesus wrote again
that he lost Jesus: He was just here, now He’s not.
My friend whose wife is dying did not write
to say his wife is not dying.
Here’s a nice sound—if they’re two leafy blocks
over at the schoolyard: children.
This is something I like to look at: thick yellow brushstrokes.
I love to whiff winter’s cilantro snows.
The taste of chokecherry’s bitter breaking on my tongue.
I loved to touch my child’s forehead
for fever and the feeling of finding none.
April 20, 2023
I hadn’t forgotten how much I loved the poetry of Thomas Lux, but I don’t think I ever realized the profound influence his poetry had on my own, its irreverent subject matter, its wordplay. This isn’t his best collection, but it is definitely a reminder of how much the world lost with his passing.
February 2, 2017
These poems unfold casually but each one delivers some nugget of surprise, insight, pleasure with language, and/or delight. Cheers to Thomas Lux for a long career of writing poems. To the Left of Time shows that very small "subjects" can be rich for poetry.
April 30, 2018
It seemed to me Lux's most personal and revealing set of poems, especially in his exploration of youth. Unfortunately his last, but not as crisp and honed as most in his oeuvre. I would start with an earlier work; New and Selected published in '97!
April 10, 2024
Clean, captivating poems that settle you in a place: the school house or an old barn or a sidewalk or History Island. I love his use of exclamation marks! And how measured and even his poems roll out big feelings or questions.
October 11, 2024
There were several fantastic poems in the first and third part but the Ode section just really didn’t hit for me.
August 8, 2016
Favs:
Cow Chases Boy
The Milking Stool
Grade School's Large Window
Ode to the Joyful
Ode to the Fire Hydrant
**Ode While Awaiting Execution ("Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not.")
Ode to Small Islands
Ode to Chronic Insolvency
Ode to the River that...
Ode to the Archipelgoes
Ode to Scars
Blue with Collapse
Praisegood Barebones
For Second Lieutenant...
Ooofy Goofy
Cow Chases Boy
The Milking Stool
Grade School's Large Window
Ode to the Joyful
Ode to the Fire Hydrant
**Ode While Awaiting Execution ("Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not.")
Ode to Small Islands
Ode to Chronic Insolvency
Ode to the River that...
Ode to the Archipelgoes
Ode to Scars
Blue with Collapse
Praisegood Barebones
For Second Lieutenant...
Ooofy Goofy
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 28, 2016
Even when a collection of Lux poems fails to satisfy, it does carry itself to some extent with its workmanship. Though several poems in this one feel a little one-note at times and don't provide a sense of movement, there is never a sense of haphazardness, and I always trust that these have been painfully reworked. The Odes surprise for the choice of subjects, but not enough pursue a new dimension after their openings.
March 30, 2016
Thomas Lux continues to write funny, pathos-filled poems that engage language with delight and surprise. The middle section of odes exemplify his quirky vision and quirky wisdom; but it's the opening section's poems of childhood that capture the imagination and the heart.
June 4, 2016
Billy Collins write a cover note and the praise is earned. Approachable interesting and personal. Currently a professor at Georgia Tech proving that even engineers need poets.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews