Split Horizon: Poems

by Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux is the author of such books as Sunday, Half Promised Land, and The Drowned River. His poetry has been fulfilling every expectation by penetrating deeper into the plain-spoken, saturnine, witty language that he virtually invented. In his latest work, Lux's level gaze, cool talk, weird rhythms, and quirky humor place him in a special territory - entirely original - of contemporary American poetry. These new poems, like Split Horizon itself, have unusual titles (Loudmouth Soup, Virgule,Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled) and circle around their subjects in strange ways, most often dealing with the lonely oddity of the individual in a society that inflexibly ignores individuality.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1994

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

[Douglas Gorney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greatest poet writing in America today. Not that I know much about other American poets and what they're writing…but I certainly haven't found anyone, living or dead, whose oddly-angled images speak to me like Thomas Lux's.

[Mikelkpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am currently reading Thomas Lux fucking incredible book,
"The Street of Clocks." When I finish it, I will read,
"Split Horizon," and I bet that that will be fucking awesome, too!

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am new to Lux but he seems to have a quirky yet pragmatic take on life that I enjoy.

My favorites are his poems to a punctuation mark, to the dollar bill, a bossy river, the accidental death of a spider, a pun on eye exams, and the opening poem, The People of the Other Village. But poetry is so individual. All I can say is that Lux is a good poet well worth your time to investigate as I did. And now I will go out and purchase more of his books; he has won me over.

[Sparrow Murray · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the voice I gravitate to. Several poems balanced wit, immediacy, and scale with grace. Many resolved themselves in manners hasty or unconvincing. The “easy” moves degrade the more expansive gestures. Perhaps, also, a matter of taste and (my) disinterested attention.

[Ben Ingall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hit and miss, but I enjoyed a somewhat unique perspective on life

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Odd subjects for poems; a volume to revisit again and again. Incidentally, this is the 1000th book I’ve read on Goodreads.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always a pleasure to reread find poems, and the chunks of this book that appear in New and Selected hold up to multiple times. Lux certainly has an incredibly unique voice, one that is crotchety and wise and funny simultaneously. Laugh out loud and read out loud, they're all further arms of the same pleasures.

Well this collection didn’t impress me as much as others, though it does contain absolute classics like “The People of the Other Village” and “I Love You, Sweatheart,” I am always in respect of Lux’s lunchpail work ethic, of poetry as his job. Someone who can write stunning poems like the two mentioned above can easily be forgiven for more clunky work like you’ll find here, that exemplify Lux’s penchant for history and observation, but not always with that recognition of pure honesty he can be so good at.