The Cradle Place: Poems – Edgy, Philosophical American Poetry Exploring Dark Connections Between Human Nature and Language

by Thomas Lux

"[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time." – Stanley Kunitz

Thomas Lux is humorous, edgy, and ever surprising in The Cradle Place, his tenth collection of verse. These fifty-two poems question language and intention and the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. Lux has long been an outspoken advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture, and his voice is urgent and unrelentingly evocative. As Sven Birkerts has noted, “Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends.”

“A book full of arresting images . . . The natural world, as it appears here, is at first lovely . . . but turns out dangerously vanquished . . . Not since Plath has hysteria looked this kissable." – San Francisco Chronicle

“Lux has a gift for the swiftly turned expression . . . Such immediacy and quirkiness will hold a reader." – Poetry

"Readers will be mesmerized." – Poetry Book of the Year, Library Journal

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Acclaimed 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

Reviews

[Robyn Witt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one might be my favorite so far, or at least a close second to God Particles. I love the silliness of many of his poems, and how many read like little engrossing short stories.

Favorites in this volume: Say You're Breathing, Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids, Can Tie Shoes But Won't, The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association, The Chief Attendant of the Napkin

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an impressive collection. Here's an example:

To Help the Monkey Cross the River
BY THOMAS LUX

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

[Richard Subber · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some folks think Lux deserves to be a prize winner.

He offers joyfully erratic, uncivil, and unimaginable poems.
Lux inclines to clunky excess in his descriptions. No spirits are born in The Cradle Place.
The jacket notes refer to “refreshing iconoclasms.” I couldn’t find any.
Mary Oliver doesn’t have to move over…

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Ben Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lux writes with humor, beauty, and compelling choice of language. Most of the poems seem to contemplate various facets of nature and their connection to each other and humanity, but there are also poems that have absurd and surrealist bents to them. A few misses here and there, but overall very enjoyable and worthwhile!

[Lauren]

at this point I only know what date it is by what goodreads tells me when I log a book.

love the dog days of summer

[Ted Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lux fairly much defies description, combining the plain speak of dilligent journalism and the eloquence of an other wise taciturn poet who will use an word or a phrase that takes a contrary turn other than where you expect it to go. He is the Poet of Unintended Results, a story teller very much in the John Cheever mode where the omniscient narrator begins yarns of folks with ambitions, intentions, desires for all manner of things making their way through their routines, only to have them interrupted and , as a consequence, find themselves to the larger world ,with what were once nuances and pesky inconviences of fact now looming over them in a crazy state of I-Told-You-So.

RENDER, REND
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now’s the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for “clearing”), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!
This is a poet who witnesses human experience and of life itself as process that goes on regardless of the fine personal and community philosophies we've written for ourselves to abide by. Life is a raw force that will continue to pulse, change, destroy and create anew regardless of how well can describe it. We can describe life's circumstances, we cannot control them. But there is heart in Lux's work, a sympathy, that sense of the struggle of humanity trying to create meaning in a world that defies logic and yet remains a species that continues to dress the world in a wonderful cosmology of expectations. There is wit, dark humor, tenderness, a wonderfully terse lyricism in Lux's finest writing. None are better .

[Ben Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book of poetry! Rather than play with formatting, genre, or medium, like many modern poets, Lux plays with ideas. His poems are free verse, with a bit of rhyme sprinkled in here and there. This book was refreshing to me because it didn’t get tangled up in trying to be “artsy” for artsy’s sake and ending up with many components that come across as frivolous or contrived. Here, Lux’s words did the talking and indeed told some compelling stories. Often his poems would throw the reader into a world where a slight detail of our world had been changed, but the poem acted as if that was completely natural. For instance, in the poem “Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids,” Lux traces a historians inquires on this topic in a humorous and clever way. I also enjoyed how some of these surreal experiences were allegorical, while others explored the experience itself without leaving the reader with a clear message or feeling. In “The Professor of Ants” the reader is left with the interesting idea that the professor needs the ants while the ants are perfectly fine without the professor. By contrast, in “I Will Please, Said the Placebo” Lux explores a strange medical situation involving men with a baby pea sized vacuum in their brains, and by the end of the poem the reader is not really guided anywhere but left with an experience.

Beyond his surrealistic adventures Lux often gives a view into little moments of life. Lux often has a sinister humor such as the irony of killing a bee with a book he is reading about the wonders of bees. But, every now and then, Lux gives the reader moments of genuine positivity. The letter to Walt Whitman from a soldier he nursed is a touching glimpse of how someone’s kindness can give a stranger a new lease on life. Overall, I felt that The Cradle Place was full of experiences that were quite captivating.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Thomas Lux's work--when his work is sharp, he thrusts you immediately into a new quantum universe which is sometimes familiar, or sometimes not. Either way, it quickly establishes its own rules and explores those rules to some human conclusion. Poems of his like "Wife Hits Moose" or "Baby, Still Crying, Swallowed by A Snake" quickly explore the new territory they have established to finally make some point about faith or hopelessness.

Unfortunately, the poems that I just named are not ones that appear in this particular collection. I am always glad to see a new collection by Lux, for I know that the situations of his poems are going to continually surprise me, whether they are horses who die mid-gallop or mummies about to be ground into powder for other uses. But a few poems in here fail to reach those human conclusions that really mark Lux's best work. At one point, we find the speaker of a poem chastising himself for the kind of historical obsession Lux himself has shown in his poems, but this conclusion is unsatisfying and seems almost the work of a novice, which Lux is not.

A marvellous poem in this collection is "To Help the Monkey Cross the River," which in the end produces a hypothetical choice as wise and as wide as implication as Ginger or MaryAnn?, or Steak or Shrimp? This poem is a fine example of the pure genius of Lux, but these examples are more scant in this book.

I still look forward to the next Lux collection but am not fully satisfied with this particular production.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Render, Render

Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now’s the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for “clearing”), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!

[Nan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My husband and I went to a Thomas Lux reading recently. After the reading, my husband -- who had never heard of or read Lux -- shook his head and said, "The same schtick. For an hour, the same old schtick." He talked as Lux were a comedian who used the same material over and over, never varying his timing or delivery.

Maybe that's the way I feel about this book. Many of the poems are scary, poignant, and arresting. Many, though, are clever for the sake of being clever. They feel like schtick. Lux seems to have lost some of the power he once had.

[Karen Douglass]

Thomas Lux writes poems full of startling but apt images, high energy, at times surreal, but always honest and surprising. These poems are not for the faint-hearted reader who prefers pleasant pastorals. But if you can handle poems with titles like "Boatloads of Mummies" or "Goofer Dust," this one's for you. Highly recommended. Lux is a craftmaster and a visionary poet.

[Christian Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: I actually rate this book 4.5 stars... it's better then 4 but not classic or mind-blowing or anything, just really solid poetry... I give the extra .5 star to the playful humor and smart-assery that weaves it's way through poems that would other-wise be over self-serious and top heavy in theme. the .5 is for having fun, but still keeping true to the craft of poetry.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a little while to get into The Cradle Place, and not every poem is perfect, but by the end, I was very much in love with Lux's ability to create a new nature with his lines, and definitely plan on reading this one again.

[Justin Guardiani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection from Lux. Once again his poem send a quake through each page with his dizzing command of words. He can be arresting with a poem only to make you laugh the next. He never fails to get every emotion out of you in poetry that is engaging and filling.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of interesting poems turning on the theme of mortality -- there is a fine philosophic set of questions going on. The topics are not the usual meditations of say, Billy Collins. Lux's poetry is technically fairly decent with few clunky or overly subjective lines. An interesting modern poet.

[Rtm Taylor-Manning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some fine work, but not as good as God Particles.

[Riegs · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Refrigerator, 1957."

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoyable