The Street Of Clocks

by Thomas Lux

The Street of Clocks, Thomas Lux's first all-new collection since 1994, is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. The poems gathered here are delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against vivid landscapes - the rural America of Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border - these poems speak from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are strange and beguiling poems.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the wake of Tom's sudden death, I reread some of the books I don't know quite so well. This book captures Lux in all his ironic, somewhat off kilter, darkly humorous poems that he manages to pack with pathos and a wry shaking of the head at what it means to be human--our cruelty and hipocrisy and joy.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not often that a book of poetry leaves me feeling detached.

Thomas Lux was recommended to me by several people whose judgement I trust, so I added him to my 'to-read' list and started with this one. I'm not sure I chose well.

It's not that I felt that there was no talent behind the verse. It's just that most of the time when I would finish a poem in this collection, I would just move on to the next one, unaffected.

That said, the poem at the end of the collection, "The Corner of Paris and Porter" almost made me move the review up a star. I felt that it was an excellent poem. I just wasn't sure if that was worth a whole star by itself.

Also - I did learn that apparently madness caused by the wind was a viable murder defense in Wyoming in the 1850's. I can believe it.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zigga zagga!

I was luxy to grab this slender hardback from the old 8th floor of the public library. Hurmmp, hurmmph, just cleaning my throat.

Ol Lux is one of those subject orientated poets (think Szymborska only funnier and not as good). Subject as center. As, "Poet, do a take on the thing would ya." He leans on descriptions and therefor is somewhat, old fashioned as far as fashion goes.

He is funny though. I liked the poems,"Can it, Ralph, can't you see the herbivores are cranky?"
"Shelf Life: An Object's Story", "A thousand minutes in Cranston. Why? What did you do?" "You're telling me the taco tuck isn't a truck at all?" "Revenge of the fig leaves" "You should have seen the look I got when I ordered a Shirley Temple and told them heavy on the the temple"

Well I made fun of a few of those but you get the jist.

Yes I wrote Lux a letter saying I thought this Street of Clocks business was a huge success even if didn't the full 5 star (old Gabe would've given it a 5er, and futuristic Gabe might as well) but I got too nervous, so I threw on a "send this letter to 5 other people or else bad look curse until the end of spring" and made a good chain of my praise.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered Lux's poems through his collection *Split Horizon*, which contains "The People of the Other Village," a poem I've carried around for years, quite literally, in a folder, a manila folder of poems I would teach if I ever had the chance to teach again. His wry humor, his acutely specific description, and that singular mix of comedy and tragedy remind me of Vonnegut, or what I remember of Vonnegut. The poems in *The Street of Clocks* feel more quiet overall, inviting the reader into a specific moment or space and then leaving them there without judgment or comment or summation, without any grand positioning or cheap, easy shots. They seem to me more like odes, small gestures that *occupy* their subjects. There's a things-as-they-are placidity that belies the art of focusing so intently. I really love his work.

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre...and strangely addictive. I can't think of another poet anything like Thomas Lux. Where does this man get his ideas? Special favorites from this collection: "The Poison Shirt" and "Henry Clay's Mouth."

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do poets assemble a group of poems for an entire collection? Do they write towards a theme? Do they simply write for years and then collect the pages in a random fashion? Is a thematic thread necessary? Yes, there are some likeable poems in this book.

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but it's close.

[Emmaline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've loved Thomas Lux ever since reading "Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy," and this was another collection of humorous, descriptive, imaginative poems. Really enjoyed many of them.

[Ben Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure if it’s because I hold Lux to a high standard, my mood at the time, or if it was the material, but it took me a little while to get into The Street of Clocks. The first poem I really enjoyed was “The Handsome Swap” (9). The childish tone paired with personification and then a slight dark twist made it both accessible and intriguing. In general, I would say that is one of Lux’s main strengths. He imagines extremely strange scenarios but then some how manages to make them relevant and absorbing. He followed with some more decent poems but nothing that got my blood pumping until “A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire” (18). Again, it is a wonderful poem/story about a boy who gets lost and a bird who led him home. Lux follows with a great example of his playfully sinister humor in “Shotgun Loaded With Rock Salt.” After that I was really into it. So, I’m not sure if you are okay with interest for the first half and engrossment for the second, but I was. I thought it was pretty solid. As a side note, Lux seemed to focus on a couple of themes this work, with a large portion of his poems dealing with life in the countryside or weird medical situations.

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection didn't impress me the way that God Particles did. There were some great descriptions and rhymeschemes, but overall the language seemed a bit too editorial and angry. I came away from the poems with a lack of substance.

[Wednesday · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Lux rocks my socks off. "The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently" is one of my favorite poems. I could talk about it for a long time, but then you would probably get bored. It's worth a read. Philosophy of Language in poetry. A nerd's paradise.

[Mikelkpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most awesome book of poems
that I have ever picked up. Lux has written a
page turner; I find myself burning through the
pages to get to the next great poem. I'm onto
his book, Split Horizon," next.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read some of these and was not impressed, and with the list of things I want to read I just figured I didn't have time to read something that didn't engage my intrest within the first few poems.

[Aaron Cummings · Rating 2 out of 5]

The street of sucks

[Ace Boggess · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a brief, subpar collection of Lux's work. The poems are mostly throwaways, except for "Henry Clay's Mouth," which is a gem and can be found elsewhere easily enough. Pass.