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Facts About the Moon
In her powerful fourth collection, poet Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
18 people are currently reading
1410 people want to read
About the author
Dorianne Laux
40 books619 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 102 reviews
July 30, 2008
Yes! Finally! A nerd like the rest of us can make beautiful some facts about the moon, learned from the Discovery Channel. And then, of course, as only Dorianne might do: make a metaphor of it that will break our hearts.
May 26, 2015
Dorianne Laux is a treasure. She writes the lightness and darkness of living in a way that takes you there. You can almost smell the smell of new mown grass and the sounds of crickets in the evening.
Want to read
August 29, 2015Writer's Almanac has been posting some killer poems from this, and it takes a lot for me to be that captivated by a poem.
April 13, 2010
No time lost, the opening poem immediately, stunningly, reminds me why Dorianne Laux still ranks among my top three favorite poets and keeps giving the other two a really hard time. “The Life of Trees” swirls me back into memory, all senses remembering. Once again, I am lying in my bed in the dark of a backcountry night, shack on a dirt road, tree branch scratching along the glass pane of my window.
… 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 stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground …
Because Laux understands and masters simplicity, and remaining simple in a complex world is one of the greatest arts of all. She speaks proletarian with the finesse of an intellectual, everything about these poems tapped into the blood of a common people in an uncommon world. She writes of the poor and homeless in “Democracy,” she makes us feel the highs and lows of everyday life, of angst, of growing pains, of loneliness and new connection.
“Vacation Sex” is a poem that is good and earthy and real, by God, real, not that drivel written in bad romances, posed for fantasy and never in reality, and never meant to be. Laux captures the couple that we are, our neighbors, our friends, dumping luggage at the door on the return home from vacation, and leaping back into the comfort of known bed, known body, known joy.
Nature, animals, earth, moon, connection with and between humans, these are the favorite things of Laux poetry. One of my favorites is “The Crossing,” in which the poet bride assesses the long-term value of a new husband by the way he treats an elk standing unmovable in the road. In the details, we are known.
Title poem, and moonlit we come to understand the light and shadow side of love, none purer than a mother’s, none more anguished and tested than the mother’s of a bad-boy son.
We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done …
… you want to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until …
I won’t finish that. Endings of poems, especially Laux’s, are such dynamite. They either blow up all in your face, a ruin, or, as Laux’s do, they blow up your heart, shatter it with rediscovered feeling, remembering, suddenly, what it feels like to be sensitive and raw and open and vulnerable to life: vacation sex, flashlights under sheets as a child reading at night, elk caught in headlights on the road, your heart “a blue cup fallen from someone’s hand.”
~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Spring 2010
… 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 stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground …
Because Laux understands and masters simplicity, and remaining simple in a complex world is one of the greatest arts of all. She speaks proletarian with the finesse of an intellectual, everything about these poems tapped into the blood of a common people in an uncommon world. She writes of the poor and homeless in “Democracy,” she makes us feel the highs and lows of everyday life, of angst, of growing pains, of loneliness and new connection.
“Vacation Sex” is a poem that is good and earthy and real, by God, real, not that drivel written in bad romances, posed for fantasy and never in reality, and never meant to be. Laux captures the couple that we are, our neighbors, our friends, dumping luggage at the door on the return home from vacation, and leaping back into the comfort of known bed, known body, known joy.
Nature, animals, earth, moon, connection with and between humans, these are the favorite things of Laux poetry. One of my favorites is “The Crossing,” in which the poet bride assesses the long-term value of a new husband by the way he treats an elk standing unmovable in the road. In the details, we are known.
Title poem, and moonlit we come to understand the light and shadow side of love, none purer than a mother’s, none more anguished and tested than the mother’s of a bad-boy son.
We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done …
… you want to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until …
I won’t finish that. Endings of poems, especially Laux’s, are such dynamite. They either blow up all in your face, a ruin, or, as Laux’s do, they blow up your heart, shatter it with rediscovered feeling, remembering, suddenly, what it feels like to be sensitive and raw and open and vulnerable to life: vacation sex, flashlights under sheets as a child reading at night, elk caught in headlights on the road, your heart “a blue cup fallen from someone’s hand.”
~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Spring 2010
May 30, 2011
This is a great collection. I can't get over how well she uses image, how image opens and opens and you become swept up in it, and suddenly see that you've been privy to an entire story that now, in a way, has become part of your own life. There's much sensuality, some humor, tremendous tenderness and joy.
The title poem is stunning, but there are so many other good ones, too.
Cello
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, sheering 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,
moaning in wind, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
The title poem is stunning, but there are so many other good ones, too.
Cello
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, sheering 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,
moaning in wind, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
January 14, 2021
I like Laux's sensuality, the way she can capture a single image or tell a whole story in the same amount of space. She's got her moments of sly humor and clever line breaks, and she can bring the quiet angst, too. Her writing flows smoothly, no hundred dollar words or convoluted narratives, just a clear, easy voice.
Some of my favorites: Cello, Vacation Sex, Laundry and Cigarettes, Puzzle Dust, What's Terrible.
January 2020: I feel like I appreciated different things about Laux's poetry this time around. I still enjoyed those last three poems I mentioned, plus: "Moon in the Window," "Facts About the Moon," "The Idea of Housework," and "Against Endings." I'm still struck by how sensual her poems are, not necessarily in a sexy way--though there are those--but the way she engages the senses through her descriptions. I also like the lists of things and the way they slowly accrete into an idea, an image, or a message such as in "What's Broken" and "Come Spring."
Note: "It Must Have Been Summer" describes the sexual abuse of a child.
Some of my favorites: Cello, Vacation Sex, Laundry and Cigarettes, Puzzle Dust, What's Terrible.
January 2020: I feel like I appreciated different things about Laux's poetry this time around. I still enjoyed those last three poems I mentioned, plus: "Moon in the Window," "Facts About the Moon," "The Idea of Housework," and "Against Endings." I'm still struck by how sensual her poems are, not necessarily in a sexy way--though there are those--but the way she engages the senses through her descriptions. I also like the lists of things and the way they slowly accrete into an idea, an image, or a message such as in "What's Broken" and "Come Spring."
Note: "It Must Have Been Summer" describes the sexual abuse of a child.
February 3, 2019
Moon in the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.
I don't know how to review this? There is just so much good here. She dives into her own life and comes up with these beautiful words spilling out, and she just keeps reaching into her own chest, pulling them out, memory after memory, moment after moment, a life lived before our eyes in word and image. She writes about love and sex and it does not annoy me; it delights. That's almost the highest praise I can give to a poet. She loves books and language and it shows. She writes from a place of sorrow and brokenness and yet also boldness and joy and health. I am delighted to see she just had a retrospective collection come out (one of those 'new and selected poems' things), but I really do think I will also be gathering up all her poems, myself, just for me. Mine, mine, mine. All to keep. All to take out from time to time and savor again. All to tell you you really need these poems in your life, too.
November 20, 2018
Dorianne Laux was one of my favorite discoveries at this year’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her candid, lyrical style and courage to address both everyday and emotionally charged topics in her work brought the crowd (including me) to its feet at the end of her headline reading. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that FACTS ABOUT THE MOON (2007), Laux’s fourth book of poetry, walks this same powerful path. Her subjects here – sex and relationships, nature and traveling, history and mortality, and, of course, the moon – are as varied as the forms and lengths she uses to express herself. Sometimes her poems are short and precise; other times they patiently weave and wind to their end. In every case, though, Laux keeps her eye on the joys, sorrows, and struggles of working-class America and never fails to be tough, witty, and vulnerable in equal measure.
September 21, 2008
Dorianne Laux brought me into Goodreads... This is her most recent book and each one grows only stronger and more expansive. Building from her beginning work which carried primarily the narratives of the personal, Laux now carries the narrative of moon, trees, the culture... without losing the erotic charge of language and life that have been hers from the start.
July 2, 2008
Awesome! I love Dorianne's poetry and this book is simply delightful. I had the privilege of hearing her read pieces of this when she was in Rochester, so I have the added pleasure of "hearing" her voice each time I reread bits and pieces of this.
October 10, 2021
When my book group discussed this, we'd read a poem and then say, "And that was yet another tour de force." Seriously, this is a perfect book about imperfect stuff. Every poem hits the mark, and there is enough internal rhyme to make your brain buzz. What a poet!
Read
May 7, 2016One of those "tweeners" hanging in the zone between 3 and 4 because some poems are stronger than others. Although there are all kinds of poems in this short collection, Laux's go-to structure is the single stanza big-boy. It might stretch to two pages but seldom makes it to three.
What's attractive about the work is how Laux finds poetry in the prosaic (a fine place to find poetry) -- things like trees, sex (did I say "prosaic"?), ravens, hummingbirds, the moon (of course), Germans, spring, a face, laundry, pool tables, sisters, housework, kissing, male bodies, female bodies, birthday parties, and starlings.
For originality, I give you "Cello":
Cello
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 the bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
September 10, 2002
Not sure why she included the date, but she did. In any event, I've seen this scenario many a time but never thought of it as music or as a bow playing a string. That's what poetry should do, I guess -- think of things we don't. Things we "A-ha, so you're right!" after reading.
What's attractive about the work is how Laux finds poetry in the prosaic (a fine place to find poetry) -- things like trees, sex (did I say "prosaic"?), ravens, hummingbirds, the moon (of course), Germans, spring, a face, laundry, pool tables, sisters, housework, kissing, male bodies, female bodies, birthday parties, and starlings.
For originality, I give you "Cello":
Cello
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 the bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
September 10, 2002
Not sure why she included the date, but she did. In any event, I've seen this scenario many a time but never thought of it as music or as a bow playing a string. That's what poetry should do, I guess -- think of things we don't. Things we "A-ha, so you're right!" after reading.
August 31, 2013
Dorianne Laux's poems are gorgeous moving pictures of an attentive, everyday life. With expert judgment and a true ear for music, Laux brushes through the thorny, face-scratching landscape of death, sex, and the common life, alternating between poems that branch into the past for clarification and insight and those that vine into the vivid, shifting world of the present for clues of how to live and for whom. Laux's poems could be set anywhere, it seems to me, but quite a few take us to the haunts of the working class: a laundromat, a truck stop, a poolhall, a city bus after dark, parking lots and highways. I am pleasantly reminded of Elizabeth Bishop's great poems like "The Moose" and "The Waiting Room", where the small spaces of the world seem to open up before the speaker, wider and more vivid as they are interiorized, as we move from crafted line to crafted line. Laux's voice is like Bishops's, though a scratchy, more bruised version of it, shaped by the blunt facts of the world, and she takes us through each memory or scene she details deftly, with a precise artistic skill that is rare in the world of poetry these days. I am glad that she is among us, throwing a torch into the shadows. Highly recommended.
July 3, 2015
Dorianne Laux, like Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton is helping me to fall in love with poetry in a way I honestly never knew I would. The attention to narrative, the caretaking of sound, the placement of text on the page, but most of all the absolute and profound honesty evident in these pages all made me swoon as I read this collection. I literally had to force myself to slow down, to savor each gem of a poem, and then I went through the poems again and again, cultivating the themes of the moon, the stars, and family. My absolute favorites in this book include the namesake poem itself, "Facts About the Moon," as well as "It Must Have Been Summer," "One Cell," and "Cello." I can honestly say I was moved enough by Laux's poetry that I am not only changed, and somehow wiser from the experience, but desperate to write my own poetry even if it might continue to hide in the form of prose.
October 14, 2014
This book is smart, fierce, lyrical, and gorgeous. Layered figurative imagery, music, a narrative impulse that engages human and animal worlds, family, faith (or lack of it) and is powerful in its restrained and strategic balance between image and utterance. Some of these poems just cut me. I have pages of notes about it, but really, I just want to say, you should read it. In "Hummingbird," Laux writes, "We buried the hummingbird/ in his mantle of light, buried/ him deep in the loam, one eye/staring into the earth's fiery/core, the other up through/ the door in the sky." And that's just how it begins.
January 1, 2018
Dorianne Laux combines a deep sense of the pain and tragedy emanating from childhood trauma with an unusual ability to arrive at joy, all embedded in clear spare lyrical lines. I'll juxtapose two passages to provide a sense, the first from "What's Terrible":
"....Terrible thing, the family.
But not so terrible as being abandoned
in a glass room with your suitcase and a bored-
off-her-ass stewardess, flipping through the pages
of a book your mother gave you before you left,
your fractured, frazzled, mysterious mother
who's not sure how to love you, the one
you've forgiven over and over, a book you finally,
in an act of desperation and fear, turn back
to the first torn page and begin, earnestly, to read."
The second from 'Morning Song":
"And I feel my body fully, vessel of desire,
my stomach a pond of want and warmth,
utterly human, divine and awake. And I can hear
each bird's separate song, the chirt and scree,
the sip, sip, sip, the dwindle and uplift yearning,
the soup's on soup's on sou's on, et up, let it go
of each individual voice, and I know I am here,
in this widening light, as we all are, with them,
even the most damaged among us or lonely
or nearly dead, and that for each of us there is
some small sound like an unseen bird or
a red bike grinding along the gravel path
that could wake us, and take us home."
One of my reading projects for the year is to revisit and in a few cases (like Laux's) read for the first time poets who have begun their careers since about 1990, compiling a personal anthology equivalent to Poulin's Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry that basically introduced me to the world of poetry from the 60s to the 80s. With that in mind, I'm going to be using GoodReads as a kind of notebook to log the poems I want to go back to. For Facts About the Moon, the list is: "The Life of Trees," "Democracy," The Ravens of Denali," "Puzzle Dust," "Poolhall," "What's Terrible," "Music in the Morning," and "Morning Song."
"....Terrible thing, the family.
But not so terrible as being abandoned
in a glass room with your suitcase and a bored-
off-her-ass stewardess, flipping through the pages
of a book your mother gave you before you left,
your fractured, frazzled, mysterious mother
who's not sure how to love you, the one
you've forgiven over and over, a book you finally,
in an act of desperation and fear, turn back
to the first torn page and begin, earnestly, to read."
The second from 'Morning Song":
"And I feel my body fully, vessel of desire,
my stomach a pond of want and warmth,
utterly human, divine and awake. And I can hear
each bird's separate song, the chirt and scree,
the sip, sip, sip, the dwindle and uplift yearning,
the soup's on soup's on sou's on, et up, let it go
of each individual voice, and I know I am here,
in this widening light, as we all are, with them,
even the most damaged among us or lonely
or nearly dead, and that for each of us there is
some small sound like an unseen bird or
a red bike grinding along the gravel path
that could wake us, and take us home."
One of my reading projects for the year is to revisit and in a few cases (like Laux's) read for the first time poets who have begun their careers since about 1990, compiling a personal anthology equivalent to Poulin's Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry that basically introduced me to the world of poetry from the 60s to the 80s. With that in mind, I'm going to be using GoodReads as a kind of notebook to log the poems I want to go back to. For Facts About the Moon, the list is: "The Life of Trees," "Democracy," The Ravens of Denali," "Puzzle Dust," "Poolhall," "What's Terrible," "Music in the Morning," and "Morning Song."
May 3, 2020
"Forget us. We don't deserve the moon"
My copy of this book is littered with blue sticky notes. So many of Laux's poems speak to me even during these weeks of quarantine when my attention span quivers and fails. The Life of Trees, Little Magnolia, Cello, Tonight I Am in Love...I read them aloud over and over again.
My copy of this book is littered with blue sticky notes. So many of Laux's poems speak to me even during these weeks of quarantine when my attention span quivers and fails. The Life of Trees, Little Magnolia, Cello, Tonight I Am in Love...I read them aloud over and over again.
March 12, 2023
"but i know it's only luck that delivered him here, luck and a love that had nothing to do with me. except that this is what we sometimes get if we live long enough. if we are patient with our lives."
July 17, 2018
Laux is my new mentor. I want to write like she writes. I fell in love with the title poem several years ago, and I wish I would have read this book sooner. Flowing, unpretentious, sometimes heartbreaking poems.
Read
September 24, 2019"Red starburst or purple-edged skirt
rolling in the vitreous waves
over the stunted ice-rimmed treetops
or in spring, candles of fireweed
and the tiny ice blue flowers
of the tundra. Tundra, a word
that sounds like a thousand caribou
pouring down a gorge."
rolling in the vitreous waves
over the stunted ice-rimmed treetops
or in spring, candles of fireweed
and the tiny ice blue flowers
of the tundra. Tundra, a word
that sounds like a thousand caribou
pouring down a gorge."
Read
February 22, 2025“our bare feet, summer almost over, swaying together on the great ship of death as clouds sailed by”
One of my absolute favorite poets.
One of my absolute favorite poets.
December 19, 2013
This is one of those books that can be read over and over again to reach the same or different understandings of how it feels to be alive. This fantastic collection of poems is one that has the potential to never cease to resonate with its readers. Readers can feel its charged energy. Without a doubt, this collection will continue again and again to be cherished. The body of shared experience can become part of the reader. Throughout Laux’s work, the question of purpose juxtaposes with desire. Human nature is made by Laux to be majestic, raw, visceral, and magical all at the same time. It’s rare if readers do not admire her title poem, “FACTS ABOUT THE MOON.” Respect for Laux’s lines: “her eyes/ two craters, and then you can’t help it/ either, you know love when you see it,/ you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull,” this indefinable moment of realization is yet a written snapshot of the poet’s capability of capturing such emotional weight.
Yes, these poems are true to the characters and speaker on the page. For example, in Laux’s poem “THE IDEA OF HOUSEWORK,” she takes the banal activity of cleaning, of doing domestic chores and she renders this experience into the universal question of what’s the point. Laux’s poems become sort of facts of themselves, they can be seen as testaments of fully experienced realities.
Laux successfully poetizes exotic events worth preserving. The poem titled “MORNING SONG” shows the fresh glimpse of what a “sleep-repaired morning” entails, along with the subjective perception that is shown perfect for its causality, forged with aligned imagery: “that for each of use there is/ some small sound like an unseen bird or/ a red bike grinding along the gravel path/ that could wake us, and take us home.” Laux’s poems contain the most incredible imagery.
Some lines that I enjoyed:
“Why should the things of this world/ shine so? Tell me if you know.”
“This walk in the park is no/ walk in the park.”
“Even sinus infections and rusty rake tines sunk/ in rank earth near the shed. Mushroom spores.”
“I never wondered. I read. Dark signs/ that crawled toward the edge of the page.”
“Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk/ stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart./ One stubborn creature staring down another./ This is how I know the marriage will last.”
By Abner Porzio
Yes, these poems are true to the characters and speaker on the page. For example, in Laux’s poem “THE IDEA OF HOUSEWORK,” she takes the banal activity of cleaning, of doing domestic chores and she renders this experience into the universal question of what’s the point. Laux’s poems become sort of facts of themselves, they can be seen as testaments of fully experienced realities.
Laux successfully poetizes exotic events worth preserving. The poem titled “MORNING SONG” shows the fresh glimpse of what a “sleep-repaired morning” entails, along with the subjective perception that is shown perfect for its causality, forged with aligned imagery: “that for each of use there is/ some small sound like an unseen bird or/ a red bike grinding along the gravel path/ that could wake us, and take us home.” Laux’s poems contain the most incredible imagery.
Some lines that I enjoyed:
“Why should the things of this world/ shine so? Tell me if you know.”
“This walk in the park is no/ walk in the park.”
“Even sinus infections and rusty rake tines sunk/ in rank earth near the shed. Mushroom spores.”
“I never wondered. I read. Dark signs/ that crawled toward the edge of the page.”
“Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk/ stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart./ One stubborn creature staring down another./ This is how I know the marriage will last.”
By Abner Porzio
November 7, 2008
As much as I enjoyed _Awake_, I don't think I was prepared for how satisfying this book would be.... Laux takes her strong line and skill with a striking image and applies it to a much wider from of experience and emotion than in her first book and the results are really really thrilling.
There's still some of the righteous anger and hurt, of course, but there's more as well-- lovely poems about Alaska that conjure up visions of S Palin back at her day job, poems about chemo and death, and a lovely lyrical suite of poems to close the book that capture happiness in some beautiful and unsparing poems.
I'm new to Laux work (thanks, Jess, for introducing her work to me) but I am really glad to have read her.
There's still some of the righteous anger and hurt, of course, but there's more as well-- lovely poems about Alaska that conjure up visions of S Palin back at her day job, poems about chemo and death, and a lovely lyrical suite of poems to close the book that capture happiness in some beautiful and unsparing poems.
I'm new to Laux work (thanks, Jess, for introducing her work to me) but I am really glad to have read her.
March 30, 2008
Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems is her most mature and strongest book. Though she's moved on from powerful themes like childhood sexual abuse, working minimum wage jobs, early marriage, and single-parenthood, she's beautifully transitioned into broader themes such as the environment in poems such as "The Life of Trees", the unknown status of the moon in the title poem, a joyful marriage in poems such as "Face Poem", "Vacation Sex", "Music in the Morning", and everyday life in many other lovely, strong-voiced, lyrical poems.
Additionally, I highly recommend her other books:
"Smoke" (2000)
"What We Carry" (1994)
"Awake" (1990)
Additionally, I highly recommend her other books:
"Smoke" (2000)
"What We Carry" (1994)
"Awake" (1990)
February 7, 2010
The cover makes me really happy.
Laux has the right mix of lyric and narrative to make me go "oh wow I feel this I'm human thanks cool."
Let's look at "The Crossing." Laux is at her best in these type of poems. I'm reading this poem, but I'm also seeing this poem. Cool metaphors that work, they really work "slow as a Greek frieze" (thank you Mrs. Garner, my high school Latin teacher). As a newly married person, I know this feeling, but this poem makes me see this feeling.
Some of the non-stanza poems like the title poem lose me a bit, but that may say more about me than the poem.
Favorite poems:
Democracy
The Crossing
Face Poem
One Cell
Laux has the right mix of lyric and narrative to make me go "oh wow I feel this I'm human thanks cool."
Let's look at "The Crossing." Laux is at her best in these type of poems. I'm reading this poem, but I'm also seeing this poem. Cool metaphors that work, they really work "slow as a Greek frieze" (thank you Mrs. Garner, my high school Latin teacher). As a newly married person, I know this feeling, but this poem makes me see this feeling.
Some of the non-stanza poems like the title poem lose me a bit, but that may say more about me than the poem.
Favorite poems:
Democracy
The Crossing
Face Poem
One Cell
May 25, 2011
The problem with poetry books about nature is that too often the author tends to superimpose a fixed set of ideas to the setting; along with fixed answers that they want the setting to give them. In Facts about the Moon, Dorianne Laux doesn’t escape this tendency as much as make you believe her ideas as much as you believe your own. In the background of the oregon woods, Laux find new ways to fuse her complex themes of class, sex, gender, love, and humanity into great poetry. In her best work she uses our common language in uncommon means; while fusing a lyrical style that dances around the rigid strictures of modern prose poetry and contempoary free verse. A first rate book
February 8, 2013
If I typed all the poems and passages that resonated with me in this collection, I could find myself transcribing the entire book.
Here is one excerpt:
. . . I can hear
each bird's separate song, the chirt and scree,
the sip, sip, sip, the dwindle and the uplift yearning,
the soup's on, soup's on, let up, let it go
of each individual voice, and I know I am here,
in this widening light, as we all are, with them,
even the most damaged among us or lonely
or nearly dead, and that for each of us there is
some small sound like an unseen bird or
a red bike grinding along the gravel path
that could wake us, and take us home.
Morning Song
Here is one excerpt:
. . . I can hear
each bird's separate song, the chirt and scree,
the sip, sip, sip, the dwindle and the uplift yearning,
the soup's on, soup's on, let up, let it go
of each individual voice, and I know I am here,
in this widening light, as we all are, with them,
even the most damaged among us or lonely
or nearly dead, and that for each of us there is
some small sound like an unseen bird or
a red bike grinding along the gravel path
that could wake us, and take us home.
Morning Song
July 17, 2019
Before I was aware that Dorianne Laux’s collection, Facts About the Moon, won the 2006 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, I was struck with the Stafford-like quality of many of her poems. Poems like “The Life of Trees,” and “The Crossing,” are Stafford-esque in their study of human roles in the natural world, while others like “The Last Days of Pompeii” and “Starling” elevate otherwise insignificant things to the status of poem-worthy subjects.
The introductory poem, “The Life of Trees,” explores an uncomfortable interrelationship between the speaker and the natural world. While the first several lines suggests this poem will follow the conventions of a typical nature poem, the lines “time / to drag the ladder from the shed, / climb onto the roof with a saw / between my teeth, cut / those suckers down” (5-9) make it clear this poem is neither ode or pastoral but careful consideration of an act that is often performed without second thought – pruning tree branches – and begs the question, Why is the house more important than the tree branches which rub against it? The moment triggers an existential reaction in the speaker who wonders “What’s reality / if not a long exhaustive cringe / from the blade, the teeth?” which suggests empathy with the “survival of the fittest” nature of life. The speaker even wishes to trade her human experience of “Money, Politics, Power” (14) for that of trees “who want only to sink their roots into the wet ground” (17 -18). The most effective line of the poem, the one I find brilliant and which I believe places this poem firmly in the eco-poetry genre, is “If trees could speak / they wouldn’t, only hum some low / green note” (21-23). Here, the poet resists anthropomorphism and honors, as best a human can, the distinct character and nature of the tree. Like Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” “The Life of Trees” illustrates the dilemma of the conscientious. The inner conflict that arises over the awareness of the adverse effects human existence exacts on the environment while also desiring to live comfortably in that environment. Like other predators, we must kill and destroy for our own survival. Unlike other predators, we can predict the long term effects of our behavior and feel guilt for those consequences. We cannot revive the deer, we can only remove it from the road so no one else gets hurt. We cannot reason with the tree and ask it to discontinue damaging the house, but we can opt to prune its branches instead of cutting the whole thing down. We will, however, add the guilt over these arbitrary choices in our favor to the emotional baggage that we seem to carry with us everywhere.
The nature-lover’s desire to help non-human citizens of the world is beautifully illustrated in “The Crossing,” a narrative about the speaker’s husband who assists a herd of elk cross a highway. Instead of coming across as an interfering, well-meaning but self-involved white guy trying to control things, the husband’s actions come across as genuine, gentle and caring. The poem’s brilliance is in its unassuming, direct language and the turn at the end when the speaker reveals, “This is how I know the marriage will last” (18).
Laux’s poetry is repeatedly characterized by reviewers as detail oriented and sensitive to the emotional significance of the everyday occurrence, and these certainly exist in “The Last Days of Pompeii.” In this speculative poem, which begins “What if the ashes came down on us,” (1) Laux imagines the kind of artifacts a twenty-first century volcano might create. Her exploration includes such items as “taped-up wired glasses” (5) and, more poignantly, the speaker “curled up next to you, one hand / on your chest like a wind-blown / blossom” (8-10). The second stanza of this poem plays with metaphor in a particularly effective manner and considers the how the historic future event of a twenty-first century disaster such as Pompeii might be viewed. “Preserved for time without end / this end-of-day tableau, on view / in a glass room in the future’s / museum, two dragonflies sealed / in amber or ice” which makes me think of the couple in the first stanza, frozen in an intimate, familiar pose for all of eternity. The poem ends, as many of Luax’s poems do, with the wonderfully arresting and sublime image of “hair / splayed against pillows of dirt / like a handful of dark straw” (32-34) brining to mind the speaker’s future death that, if unpredictable, is inevitable.
“Starling,” which is the last poem of the collection, pays homage to a bird that most birdwatchers and birdfeeders consider pests. In essence, this poems combines a natural theme with elevation of the ordinary (or even despised), making it the perfect poem to conclude the collection with. In “Starling,” Laux first describes then identifies with the bird, effectively honoring the ugly and common in the world as well as in herself. “Oh to be a rider on the purple storm” (2-3) she writes “Not peacock or eagle but lowly / starling, Satan’s bird / spreading her spotted wings / over the Valley of Bones” (3-7). I just find these lines a sublime recognition of the Jungian dark side which is beautifully reclaimed by the speaker in the poem’s final lines, “my plush / black nest. My silver claw/ and gravel craw. My only song” (15-17).
Each section of this collection of poetry contains poems which exhibit Laux’s concern with nature, the role of people in nature and society, death, and the sublime in such a way as to create a number of related threads which intertwine to create a very cohesive whole. I look forward to reading more of her work.
The introductory poem, “The Life of Trees,” explores an uncomfortable interrelationship between the speaker and the natural world. While the first several lines suggests this poem will follow the conventions of a typical nature poem, the lines “time / to drag the ladder from the shed, / climb onto the roof with a saw / between my teeth, cut / those suckers down” (5-9) make it clear this poem is neither ode or pastoral but careful consideration of an act that is often performed without second thought – pruning tree branches – and begs the question, Why is the house more important than the tree branches which rub against it? The moment triggers an existential reaction in the speaker who wonders “What’s reality / if not a long exhaustive cringe / from the blade, the teeth?” which suggests empathy with the “survival of the fittest” nature of life. The speaker even wishes to trade her human experience of “Money, Politics, Power” (14) for that of trees “who want only to sink their roots into the wet ground” (17 -18). The most effective line of the poem, the one I find brilliant and which I believe places this poem firmly in the eco-poetry genre, is “If trees could speak / they wouldn’t, only hum some low / green note” (21-23). Here, the poet resists anthropomorphism and honors, as best a human can, the distinct character and nature of the tree. Like Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” “The Life of Trees” illustrates the dilemma of the conscientious. The inner conflict that arises over the awareness of the adverse effects human existence exacts on the environment while also desiring to live comfortably in that environment. Like other predators, we must kill and destroy for our own survival. Unlike other predators, we can predict the long term effects of our behavior and feel guilt for those consequences. We cannot revive the deer, we can only remove it from the road so no one else gets hurt. We cannot reason with the tree and ask it to discontinue damaging the house, but we can opt to prune its branches instead of cutting the whole thing down. We will, however, add the guilt over these arbitrary choices in our favor to the emotional baggage that we seem to carry with us everywhere.
The nature-lover’s desire to help non-human citizens of the world is beautifully illustrated in “The Crossing,” a narrative about the speaker’s husband who assists a herd of elk cross a highway. Instead of coming across as an interfering, well-meaning but self-involved white guy trying to control things, the husband’s actions come across as genuine, gentle and caring. The poem’s brilliance is in its unassuming, direct language and the turn at the end when the speaker reveals, “This is how I know the marriage will last” (18).
Laux’s poetry is repeatedly characterized by reviewers as detail oriented and sensitive to the emotional significance of the everyday occurrence, and these certainly exist in “The Last Days of Pompeii.” In this speculative poem, which begins “What if the ashes came down on us,” (1) Laux imagines the kind of artifacts a twenty-first century volcano might create. Her exploration includes such items as “taped-up wired glasses” (5) and, more poignantly, the speaker “curled up next to you, one hand / on your chest like a wind-blown / blossom” (8-10). The second stanza of this poem plays with metaphor in a particularly effective manner and considers the how the historic future event of a twenty-first century disaster such as Pompeii might be viewed. “Preserved for time without end / this end-of-day tableau, on view / in a glass room in the future’s / museum, two dragonflies sealed / in amber or ice” which makes me think of the couple in the first stanza, frozen in an intimate, familiar pose for all of eternity. The poem ends, as many of Luax’s poems do, with the wonderfully arresting and sublime image of “hair / splayed against pillows of dirt / like a handful of dark straw” (32-34) brining to mind the speaker’s future death that, if unpredictable, is inevitable.
“Starling,” which is the last poem of the collection, pays homage to a bird that most birdwatchers and birdfeeders consider pests. In essence, this poems combines a natural theme with elevation of the ordinary (or even despised), making it the perfect poem to conclude the collection with. In “Starling,” Laux first describes then identifies with the bird, effectively honoring the ugly and common in the world as well as in herself. “Oh to be a rider on the purple storm” (2-3) she writes “Not peacock or eagle but lowly / starling, Satan’s bird / spreading her spotted wings / over the Valley of Bones” (3-7). I just find these lines a sublime recognition of the Jungian dark side which is beautifully reclaimed by the speaker in the poem’s final lines, “my plush / black nest. My silver claw/ and gravel craw. My only song” (15-17).
Each section of this collection of poetry contains poems which exhibit Laux’s concern with nature, the role of people in nature and society, death, and the sublime in such a way as to create a number of related threads which intertwine to create a very cohesive whole. I look forward to reading more of her work.
April 12, 2011
I haven't read all that many poetry collections in my life, so I don't really have a wide range of comparison, but I really enjoyed this collection. I'd been reading a few Dorianne Laux poems from some books I had on creative writing, so I thought I'd give one of her books a try. There's really some BEAUTIFUL phrasing in here. Her concepts and language are truly stunning, and even if not every poem is your cup of tea, there's such a wide variety that I'm sure most people will find something to love about this collection.
April 7, 2014
Lyrical, clear, honest, emotional, gently powerful, surprising -- Laux's poetic voice delivers sometimes shocking truth in perfect clarity with compassion and complete acceptance of herself and the rest of us. "If trees could speak they wouldn't." One of the saddest lines I've ever read is from her poem What's Broken: "Possible, unthinkable, / the cricket's tiny back as I lie / on the lawn in the dark, my heart." I love her poems about ordinary things.
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