DROWNED RIVER

by Thomas Lux

Poems deal with snow, the family, mortality, grief, torture, history, warfare, food, travel and vanity

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Hardcover

First published January 23, 1990

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 4 out of 5]

I liked God Particles a little better than this one...even encountered one poem I disliked in this book ("So you put the dog to sleep"...perhaps I am just too sentimental to like this one or to appreciate the irony). However, there were way more poems that I loved than did not, like the one about cherub paintings, "Painfully Banal," and the last poem in the collection. He's still my favorite poet :) on to the next book.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title alone deserves an applause. Beautiful poems, some of Lux's finest. I also recommend his chapbook 'A Boat in the Forest', which was written around the same time. RIP to a real one.

[Michael Heimbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

My copy contains an inscription from the author to a mysterious couple named Jim and Jean, who apparently didn’t think The Drowned River was good enough to keep. Your loss, Jim and Jean.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm pretty sure you can rightly find the highlights of this book in new and selected, but the book as a whole is still worth four stars for the fact that even in Lux's less sublime poems, there is still a wonderful pleasure in finding the logic that is discovered during the course of their composition. Even In the more pedestrian poems, Lux still rings innately human, though of course a bit odd, kind of like James Tate still among the world of the living.

[Riegs · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Motel Seedy."