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Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems
Drawing from five expansive volumes and including twenty new pieces, Only as the Day Is Long represents an astonishing, confident, and daring body of work from one of our most accomplished poets. Philip Levine praises Dorianne Laux for her poetry’s “enormous precision and beauty,” and B. H. Fairchild proclaims that her poems are “brought to the hard edge of meaning.” The new poems are odes to Laux’s mother, an extraordinary and ordinary woman of the Depression era. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long shows Laux at the height of her powers.
FROM “DUST”
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
FROM “DUST”
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
- GenresPoetryLiterary Fiction
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 15, 2019
72 people are currently reading
808 people want to read
About the author
Dorianne Laux
44 books615 followersDORIANNE LAUX’s most recent collection is Life On Earth. Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also author of The Book of Men (W.W. Norton) which won the Paterson Prize for Poetry. Her fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005. A finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Red Dragonfly Press released The Book of Women in 2012. Co-author of The Poet's Companion, she’s the recipient of three Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as Tinhouse, Orion, Oxford American and Ms. Magazine. Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Petaluma, California, and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. She has taught poetry at the University of Oregon and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. In 2008 she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh where she directs the program In Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. She is founding faculty for Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
September 21, 2020
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.
*
Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many have perished
beneath the trees.
The river rolls on.
There will always be
silence, no matter
how long someone
has wept against
the side of a house,
bare forearms pressed
to the shingles.
Everything ends.
Even pain, even sorrow.
The swans drift on.
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.
*
Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many have perished
beneath the trees.
The river rolls on.
There will always be
silence, no matter
how long someone
has wept against
the side of a house,
bare forearms pressed
to the shingles.
Everything ends.
Even pain, even sorrow.
The swans drift on.
July 8, 2019
(TW: child sexual abuse) This anthology contains selections from her earlier books of poetry plus some new poems. The early poems dealing with the abuse she suffered as a child and her time in a mental institution are raw and show great vulnerability. The later poems reflect her growing maturity, but the emotions are more controlled/tamed. In the final poems mourning her mother’s death, the child-like vulnerability comes through again. A great collection.
May 29, 2020
Cello
Dorianne Laux
When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
Kind of cool, that, thinking of two trees, one dead and one alive, like cello player and cello. This new collection by Laux is really an old collection, or I should say a selection of best poems from five previous books coupled with 20 new poems at the end.
A good mix of subject matter, reflecting Laux's expanding range as she grows older. Accessible, yet artful, two "a" words that don't always go together in poetry.
Dorianne Laux
When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
Kind of cool, that, thinking of two trees, one dead and one alive, like cello player and cello. This new collection by Laux is really an old collection, or I should say a selection of best poems from five previous books coupled with 20 new poems at the end.
A good mix of subject matter, reflecting Laux's expanding range as she grows older. Accessible, yet artful, two "a" words that don't always go together in poetry.
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December 29, 2018Publisher's Weekly Starred Review: Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems
Dorianne Laux. Norton, $26.95 (128p) ISBN 978-0-393-65233-8
Featuring selections from five books augmented by 20 new poems, this generous volume from Laux (The Book of Men) reads something like a life story: notably, one that begins with familial fear, incest, and abuse. Travelling through confusion, adult sex, motherhood, love, fatigue, and redemption, Laux ends where she begins: with her mother, who is, to the last, a troublesome nurse. In spite of everything, the poet can’t help but celebrate the self’s mistakes and triumphs. When Laux welcomes readers into a personal moment, she speaks for humankind: “We’ve forgotten the luxury of dumbness,/ how once we crouched naked on an outcrop/ of rock, the moon huge and untouched/ above us, speechless.” Concrete places abound: bedroom, trailer, hospital psychiatric ward, a porch. There is a lot of sex; for example, “Vacation Sex,” an aroused version of a travel tour, revels in its own obsessive pleasure. Some of the best poems here appear toward the chronologically organized collection’s end, where humor arrives despite a mother’s growing dementia. And in the long biographical poem “Arizona,” Laux writes lovingly of that same mother’s face as “a map of every place she’d been.” This is a catalogue of honest work, from beginning to end. (Jan.)
Dorianne Laux. Norton, $26.95 (128p) ISBN 978-0-393-65233-8
Featuring selections from five books augmented by 20 new poems, this generous volume from Laux (The Book of Men) reads something like a life story: notably, one that begins with familial fear, incest, and abuse. Travelling through confusion, adult sex, motherhood, love, fatigue, and redemption, Laux ends where she begins: with her mother, who is, to the last, a troublesome nurse. In spite of everything, the poet can’t help but celebrate the self’s mistakes and triumphs. When Laux welcomes readers into a personal moment, she speaks for humankind: “We’ve forgotten the luxury of dumbness,/ how once we crouched naked on an outcrop/ of rock, the moon huge and untouched/ above us, speechless.” Concrete places abound: bedroom, trailer, hospital psychiatric ward, a porch. There is a lot of sex; for example, “Vacation Sex,” an aroused version of a travel tour, revels in its own obsessive pleasure. Some of the best poems here appear toward the chronologically organized collection’s end, where humor arrives despite a mother’s growing dementia. And in the long biographical poem “Arizona,” Laux writes lovingly of that same mother’s face as “a map of every place she’d been.” This is a catalogue of honest work, from beginning to end. (Jan.)
November 21, 2021
Only As The Day Is Long gathers poems from Dorianne Laux’s existing publications by BOA Editions and W.W. Norton. Beginning with Awake, published in 1990, and then reaching The Book of Men, published in 2011, Laux offers readers a vantage point to view her poetic voice and concerns over two decades. The selected poems are largely free verse and driven by clear narratives. A final set - gathered for the first time and largely focused around the passing of Laux’s mother - round out the collection.
The temptation I find, with collected poems, is to run through them in a single sitting. While Laux’s collection has been assembled to be smoothly read, her poetic voice and style does shift appreciably over time. Poems taken from early collections like Awake and What We Carry read as companions, but differ from later works. The selected poems from these collections centre around the body and its pleasures, as well as an exploration of paternal abuse and violence. They feel immediate and private – I think of Sally Mann’s photography, in particular, her art monograph Immediate Family, when I read them. There is a feeling of disclosing what is normally kept out of the public eye. Consider the ending of “Twelve”, where she recounts how young children would sneak out to the woods and view pornographic magazines:
These poems are deeply fascinating, transgressive only if we interpret the narratives provided as controversial. I have not read many collections which touch on female pleasure and sexual agency, or on childhood violence and sexual innocence with such clearness. The first two collections really stood out.
The later collections shift, as earlier mentioned, towards themes of ageing, nature, and masculinity. There is a turning towards the wider world, and while there are poems here that I really liked, such as “Life is Beautiful” or “Staff Sgt. Metz”, I did not feel that my attention was held as fiercely. Taking the time to revisit these later collections with fresh eyes, I do see the beauty and refinement within them. There are interesting moments where I feel the speakers drawing upon a willingness to be flawed. However, they are on the whole more restrained in emotion. I may like them more as I revisit them.
The new poems that close out Only As The Day Is Long can read as a ‘return to form’ of sorts. Laux mainly includes poems about her mother and the years leading up to her death. I have her long narrative poem, “Arizona”, copiously annotated and dog-eared. Here, I find Laux writing with the wisdom of an older speaker, attentive to the beauty and persistence of age. Its closing stanza, which talks about what she may have done if she knew when she would last see her mother alive, shifts from speculation, reality, thought, and finally a deeper world:
It is arresting. I will read more of Laux’s collections.
The temptation I find, with collected poems, is to run through them in a single sitting. While Laux’s collection has been assembled to be smoothly read, her poetic voice and style does shift appreciably over time. Poems taken from early collections like Awake and What We Carry read as companions, but differ from later works. The selected poems from these collections centre around the body and its pleasures, as well as an exploration of paternal abuse and violence. They feel immediate and private – I think of Sally Mann’s photography, in particular, her art monograph Immediate Family, when I read them. There is a feeling of disclosing what is normally kept out of the public eye. Consider the ending of “Twelve”, where she recounts how young children would sneak out to the woods and view pornographic magazines:
And when the turning
of the pages began, ceremoniously, exposing
thigh after thigh, breast after beautiful, terrible
breast, Martin leaned to one side,
and slid the soft palm of his hands
over his baby brother’s eyes.
These poems are deeply fascinating, transgressive only if we interpret the narratives provided as controversial. I have not read many collections which touch on female pleasure and sexual agency, or on childhood violence and sexual innocence with such clearness. The first two collections really stood out.
The later collections shift, as earlier mentioned, towards themes of ageing, nature, and masculinity. There is a turning towards the wider world, and while there are poems here that I really liked, such as “Life is Beautiful” or “Staff Sgt. Metz”, I did not feel that my attention was held as fiercely. Taking the time to revisit these later collections with fresh eyes, I do see the beauty and refinement within them. There are interesting moments where I feel the speakers drawing upon a willingness to be flawed. However, they are on the whole more restrained in emotion. I may like them more as I revisit them.
The new poems that close out Only As The Day Is Long can read as a ‘return to form’ of sorts. Laux mainly includes poems about her mother and the years leading up to her death. I have her long narrative poem, “Arizona”, copiously annotated and dog-eared. Here, I find Laux writing with the wisdom of an older speaker, attentive to the beauty and persistence of age. Its closing stanza, which talks about what she may have done if she knew when she would last see her mother alive, shifts from speculation, reality, thought, and finally a deeper world:
I might have woken her, taken her tarnished
shoulders in my arms, rocked her like a child.
As it was, I bent over her and kissed her
on the temple, a curl of her hair caught
for a moment in the corner of my lips.
This is my mother I thought, her brain
sleeping beneath her skull, her heart
sluggish but still beating, her body
my first house, the dark horse I rode in on.
It is arresting. I will read more of Laux’s collections.
May 14, 2021
A study in poignant detail and honesty.
February 8, 2020
Only As the Day is Long by Dorianne Laux is a collection of new and selected poems that I picked up when I heard the poet read in Portland, Oregon at Powells Books. The book includes a large number of selected poems from five earlier collections, as well as a number of new poems in the title section, “Only as the Day is Long.” There is a lot to love here and I’ve been reading it gradually over a month or more. I think I am most moved by the new poems, though, many of which deal with the death of the poet’s mother (who also appears in many of the earlier poems).
February 24, 2019
This is Laux's selected poems, and I could not stop reading it. What powerful, astonishing work with voice and image here. I'll be returning to this collection over and over again.
March 12, 2020
Dorianne Laux is quite the accomplished poet. If I were to suggest one flaw in the work, though, it would be her incessant need to list and lean on monotone syntax.
August 22, 2019
Dorianne Laux is always interesting. I especially enjoyed the recollection here of previous work and the generous section of new poems. Her poetry becomes more powerful and moving with each publication. The last 2 poems here, about her mother, are excellent examples of how she can be muscular and tender at the same time. She likes to paint herself as a kind of madwoman loose in underwear and wild hair, but I think she has absolute control.
June 8, 2023
Laux has a gift for mining her life’s experiences to compose anecdotal poems of tremendous candor and honesty. Her keen eye for details, her luminous language, and her undaunted voice make for dozens of indelible pieces ranging in topics from abuse to desire and from her own motherhood to caretaking of her ailing mother. By going back to her experiences, she arrives in her poems at moments where she offers reflective knowledge on what it means to endure survival and struggle, and likewise she identifies grace and gratitude when experiences afford her moments of triumph and peace. Laux is a poet to admire because she has a unique ability to expound upon the ordinary in order to locate something revealing or splendid that should not be overlooked.
October 12, 2018
A thousand 5’s. My God, Laux is brilliant.
January 4, 2022
This is not the first poetry collection that I have read, but it is the first that I have completed. My favorite poem from Laux is "As It Is", I found a reading of the poem on youtube and can play it on repeat for a good part of the day like a song. I am wondering now, having watched many poetry recommendation videos, how anyone blitzes through a collection without feeling like they are not properly engaging with the work (hell, whatever that means). I will continue to read poetry collections but I think poetry might work much like music in that it can take you more than a year to appreciate each song because you're stuck on the one you love.
September 7, 2020
I've read all of Laux's previous books represented in this "collected & new" compendium, but so much enjoyed reading so many old favorites again. And the new poems are extra special, many of them about her mother's life and death. Dorianne Laux has long been one of my favorite contemporary poets. This book is a treasure.
March 11, 2020
"Pebbles grow smaller,/ smoother beneath night's/ rough currents. We walk// long distances, carting/ our bags, our packages./ Burdens of gift." A moving new-and-selected that digs deeply into life - such a sweet gift.
July 25, 2019
Dorianne Laux: The Queen, The Rock Star, The RuPaul of Poetry. ❤️❤️❤️
August 22, 2024
I have been a great admirer of Laux's poetry (as well as having called her a friend). I had picked this collected works from a used bookstore a few years ago and then forgot I had it.
Many of the collected works, I already knew (I have all of her other collections) and even though I'd read these before, even been present when she'd read them at a reading in Raleigh, NC, I felt like I'd found an old friend in her words and rediscovered Laux's incredible sense of rhythm and her manipulation of words (and I owe a debt of thanks that she helped me to refine my own skills with manipulation).
Laux frequently explores grief (her mother's death) and her own renegade youth, and she is unapologetic in her poems about marriage and sexuality, and though it might be uncomfortable, her own experiences with sexual abuse.
The real treat in this collection was the last section which were new works (or at least new for me) and many of these dove deeper into her expressions of grief and the loss of her mother. There is one poem, "Evening," that I don't know I'll ever forget and I would probably want read at my own funeral someday. It left me breathless.
Many of the collected works, I already knew (I have all of her other collections) and even though I'd read these before, even been present when she'd read them at a reading in Raleigh, NC, I felt like I'd found an old friend in her words and rediscovered Laux's incredible sense of rhythm and her manipulation of words (and I owe a debt of thanks that she helped me to refine my own skills with manipulation).
Laux frequently explores grief (her mother's death) and her own renegade youth, and she is unapologetic in her poems about marriage and sexuality, and though it might be uncomfortable, her own experiences with sexual abuse.
The real treat in this collection was the last section which were new works (or at least new for me) and many of these dove deeper into her expressions of grief and the loss of her mother. There is one poem, "Evening," that I don't know I'll ever forget and I would probably want read at my own funeral someday. It left me breathless.
June 20, 2021
"The Garden" might be one of the most astonishing poems I've ever read.
June 13, 2021
About many "New and Selected" collections, I've decided f they're too big, don't bother. Dorianne Laux's is NOT too big. In reading this I remember why I kept the first book of hers I owned (it was a gift--both meanings).
Of this selection, all of the poems have something; a handful I am particularly grateful I ran into in this world. They made me stop. What more can one ask?
Here are my Top Eight:
"Two Pictures of My Sister"
"Ghosts"
"Twelve"
"The Lovers"
"Pearl"
"Bakersfield"
"Augusta, Maine 1951"
"Arizona"
Honorable mentions:
"What My Father Told Me"
"The Tooth Fairy"
"Quarter to Six"
"Sunday"
"Aphasia" (which I would have titled "Venezuela")
"Cher"
"Mick Jagger"
Thank you Dorianne Laux for your poems of connection.
Of this selection, all of the poems have something; a handful I am particularly grateful I ran into in this world. They made me stop. What more can one ask?
Here are my Top Eight:
"Two Pictures of My Sister"
"Ghosts"
"Twelve"
"The Lovers"
"Pearl"
"Bakersfield"
"Augusta, Maine 1951"
"Arizona"
Honorable mentions:
"What My Father Told Me"
"The Tooth Fairy"
"Quarter to Six"
"Sunday"
"Aphasia" (which I would have titled "Venezuela")
"Cher"
"Mick Jagger"
Thank you Dorianne Laux for your poems of connection.
October 2, 2022
4.5? (Edit: No, 5 stars for sure. I mean, I took pictures of almost all the poems to keep on my phone LOL)
if there was one word to describe dorianne laux’s poetry, i would say “raw.” (or “gritty”.) and in the best possible way! i imagine her writing in the dark, seated at a hardwood desk with a well-loved fountain pen, reflecting on her life.
she reminds me of sharon olds a little bit in the way she documents desire—it’s so real and human and very much spoken from experience. that is, i feel like this collection could only be written by someone who has experienced their fair share of life. i suppose in that way the poems can be described as very middle-age, and thus so honest, wise, sure, and quietly insistent.
Kissing
They are kissing, on a park bench,
on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway
or on the floor of a church. Kissing
as the streets fill with balloons
or soldiers, locusts or confetti, water
or fire or dust. Kissing down through
the centuries under sun or stars, a dead tree,
an umbrella, amid derelicts. Kissing
as Christ carries his cross, as ahha di
sings his speeches, as a bullet
careens through the air toward a child’s
good heart. They are kissing,
long, deep, spacious kisses, exploring
the silence of the tongue, the mute
rungs of the upper palate, hungry
for the living flesh. They are still
kissing when the cars crash and the bombs
drop, when the babies are born crying
into the white air, when Mozart bends
to his bowl of soup and Stalin
bends to his garden. They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them. They kiss until their lips
swell, their thick tongues quickening
to the budded touch, licking up
the sweet juices. I want to believe
they are kissing to save the world,
but they’re not. All they know
is this press and need, these two-legged
beasts, their faces like roses crushed
together and opening, they are covering
their teeth, they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst, they are sealing
the hard words in, they are dying
for our sins. In a broken world they are
practicing this simple and singular act
to perfection. They are holding
onto each other. They are kissing.
if there was one word to describe dorianne laux’s poetry, i would say “raw.” (or “gritty”.) and in the best possible way! i imagine her writing in the dark, seated at a hardwood desk with a well-loved fountain pen, reflecting on her life.
she reminds me of sharon olds a little bit in the way she documents desire—it’s so real and human and very much spoken from experience. that is, i feel like this collection could only be written by someone who has experienced their fair share of life. i suppose in that way the poems can be described as very middle-age, and thus so honest, wise, sure, and quietly insistent.
Kissing
They are kissing, on a park bench,
on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway
or on the floor of a church. Kissing
as the streets fill with balloons
or soldiers, locusts or confetti, water
or fire or dust. Kissing down through
the centuries under sun or stars, a dead tree,
an umbrella, amid derelicts. Kissing
as Christ carries his cross, as ahha di
sings his speeches, as a bullet
careens through the air toward a child’s
good heart. They are kissing,
long, deep, spacious kisses, exploring
the silence of the tongue, the mute
rungs of the upper palate, hungry
for the living flesh. They are still
kissing when the cars crash and the bombs
drop, when the babies are born crying
into the white air, when Mozart bends
to his bowl of soup and Stalin
bends to his garden. They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them. They kiss until their lips
swell, their thick tongues quickening
to the budded touch, licking up
the sweet juices. I want to believe
they are kissing to save the world,
but they’re not. All they know
is this press and need, these two-legged
beasts, their faces like roses crushed
together and opening, they are covering
their teeth, they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst, they are sealing
the hard words in, they are dying
for our sins. In a broken world they are
practicing this simple and singular act
to perfection. They are holding
onto each other. They are kissing.
April 8, 2024
“There are times when something so joyous or so horrible happens our only response is an intake of breath, and then we’re back at the truth of it, that ball of life expanding and exploding on impact, our heads, our chests, filled with that first unspeakable light.”
“The moon is backing away from us an inch and a half each year. That means if you’re like me and were born around fifty years ago the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth.”
“How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? Each one came rushing through the rooms he left. Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.”
A few gems for imagery but overall too heavy on the physical as trauma for me without a lot of redemption or paths to transformation, so not sure it is good for those with trauma either.
“The moon is backing away from us an inch and a half each year. That means if you’re like me and were born around fifty years ago the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth.”
“How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? Each one came rushing through the rooms he left. Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.”
A few gems for imagery but overall too heavy on the physical as trauma for me without a lot of redemption or paths to transformation, so not sure it is good for those with trauma either.
January 23, 2019
So wonderful to see Dorianne's new poems, many of them about her deceased mother. She is, in my opinion, a virtuoso!
April 6, 2019
all the stars in the sky...
March 30, 2020
I loved this book so much.
August 16, 2024
Excellent collection. Hard for me to believe I’ve not read her before now.
Read
September 9, 2025
Missy,
this is what's become of the wedding you swore you'd come to
wearing black.
[...]
We traded stories, our military fathers:
yours locking you in a closet for the days it took
to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat
pulled over your head; mine, who worked
his ringed fingers inside me while the house
slept, my face pressed to the pillow, my fists
knotted into the sheets. Some nights
I can’t eat.
[...]
I don’t know
where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth
those nights you tongued me open in the broken light
that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern
found us and wrenched us apart, the half-moon of your breast
exposed as you spit on him. “Now you’re going to get it,”
he hissed through this teeth and you screamed, “Get what?”
As if there was anything anyone could give you.
If I could write you now, I’d tell you
I still see your face, bone-white as my china
above the black velvet cape you wore to my wedding
twelve years ago, the hem of your black crepe skirt
brushing up the dirty rice in swirls
as you swept down the reception line to kiss me.
“Now you’re going to get it,” you whispered,
cupping my cheek in your hand.
— from Quarter to Six
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me,
not like you think: all darkness and silence.
There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.
I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair.
Especially when they fight, and when they sing.
— from Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
What are you now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.
I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.
[...]
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I’m the only one here on my knees.
— from Trying to Raise the Dead
October 2, 2020
I’ve been reading poems; but this is the first book of poems I’ve danced with in a while.
It took me three months to finish this slim New and Selected poems. I just took a chance. Never read Dorianne Laux. In fact, I Googled her so I could see someone introduce her at a workshop—I wasn’t sure how to pronounce her last name. It’s like “low” by the way.
It took me three months to finish because it’s just SO good that I made an effort to savor. I allowed myself two or three poems here. One before starting my teaching day. Another after waking. Like finishing a great novel, there’s something about living with a poet for a long while. Especially when reading poems selected from various eras of her life. It’s such a sadness to read and such a sadness to finish.
There’s nothing incredibly profound that I can say about Laux’s work that hasn’t already been said.
It’s accessible without being thin; it reads like a cross between Linda Pastan, Jane Kenyon, and Wendell Berry. Her word choices, similes, there’s a surprise on every single page; she is as an enemy of cliche and sentimentality.
You know what? The best thing I can do is move aside. Listen and see this passage from “Ravens of Denali,” a poem I very much liked, but not remotely even the best one in this work! The word choices!!!! The imagery!!!!
“Tundra, a word
that sounds like a thousand caribou
pouring down a gorge.
But all that might be difficult
for an orphaned 7th grader to draw
with three chewed up crayons
and a piece of butcher paper.
As would these eight giggling ravens
with their shrewd eyes and slit-shine wings,
beaks like keloid scars. Acrobats
of speed and sheen. Black boot
of the bird family.”
It took me three months to finish this slim New and Selected poems. I just took a chance. Never read Dorianne Laux. In fact, I Googled her so I could see someone introduce her at a workshop—I wasn’t sure how to pronounce her last name. It’s like “low” by the way.
It took me three months to finish because it’s just SO good that I made an effort to savor. I allowed myself two or three poems here. One before starting my teaching day. Another after waking. Like finishing a great novel, there’s something about living with a poet for a long while. Especially when reading poems selected from various eras of her life. It’s such a sadness to read and such a sadness to finish.
There’s nothing incredibly profound that I can say about Laux’s work that hasn’t already been said.
It’s accessible without being thin; it reads like a cross between Linda Pastan, Jane Kenyon, and Wendell Berry. Her word choices, similes, there’s a surprise on every single page; she is as an enemy of cliche and sentimentality.
You know what? The best thing I can do is move aside. Listen and see this passage from “Ravens of Denali,” a poem I very much liked, but not remotely even the best one in this work! The word choices!!!! The imagery!!!!
“Tundra, a word
that sounds like a thousand caribou
pouring down a gorge.
But all that might be difficult
for an orphaned 7th grader to draw
with three chewed up crayons
and a piece of butcher paper.
As would these eight giggling ravens
with their shrewd eyes and slit-shine wings,
beaks like keloid scars. Acrobats
of speed and sheen. Black boot
of the bird family.”
March 4, 2020
I fell in love with Laux's voice through "The Life of Trees," one of my very favorite poems of recent vintage (and up there in the mix of best ever.) After reading the volume it was published in, Fact About the Moon, I decided that it was time to check out the arc of her career. Very glad I did. Writing in a voice somewhat reminiscent of Phil Levine--she dedicates a lovely tribute to him--but very much her own, Laux's work is remarkable for its consistency. Almost no slow spaces in this collection which spans some 30 years. It does make it hard to single out favorites, since everyone will have their own, but I'll go with: "Pearl" (dedicated to Janis Joplin); "The Ravens of Denali"; "Dog Moon," "Dark Charms" and of course "The Life of Trees. A few lines from that poem:
I want to sleep
and dream the life of trees, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Money, Politics, Power,
Will or Right, who want little from the night
but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like fashion models
or old hippies. If trees could speak,
they wouldn't, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the cold wind.
During the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like ancient lace above their crowns.
Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear
nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,
that whipped bully who rises up
and becomes his own dead father.
I want to sleep
and dream the life of trees, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Money, Politics, Power,
Will or Right, who want little from the night
but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like fashion models
or old hippies. If trees could speak,
they wouldn't, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the cold wind.
During the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like ancient lace above their crowns.
Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear
nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,
that whipped bully who rises up
and becomes his own dead father.
April 7, 2019
Dorianne Laux was the first poet I worshipped as an adult (as a teenager, I was all about the Sylvia Plath). While she is not terribly prolific, when she does publish work, it is consistently strong. That having been said, the first two sections of the book--selections from her first two books--resonated with me more and seem to take more risks if not in form than in content. When I originally read THE BOOK OF MEN, it didn't really do anything for me; the poems are well-crafted (Laux's work is never sloppy or lazy), but emotionally, they seem a little too easy. So when I revisited some of those poems, I wasn't surprised that I still felt them lacking an emotional core both individually and collectively. However, I was surprised that the newer poems--mostly about her mother and the death of her mother--didn't explore grief deeply enough to be as effective as they could be. "Arizona" is the exception--that poem nearly killed me when I heard Laux read it recently at AWP. It might be that these poems were written too close to her mother's death. I don't know. Grief is an ever-evolving animal, so I expect that in the future, we'll see more grief poems from Laux, and they might go deeper. In any case, I'll continue to read her work.
August 6, 2022
A fellow writer from my poetry group recommended this book of poetry to me. I was not familiar with Dorianne Laux and was immediately taken in by her boldness, honesty and vulnerability. Writing about family issues, including the passing of her mother and father, as well as some of our generations most life-changing issues and circumstances, I felt an immediate kinship with her work. I was especially impressed with her poem "Pearl", a recapitulation of Janis Joplin's impact in our culture. This book presents a broad selection of writings from Dorianne's life, all of which prompted me to reconsider the time in which I have lived. A worthy read from a poet to writes about the grit and disappointment of life.
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