Selected Poems

'The latest collection of dazzlers from one of the few poets writing today who fills me with envy. Lux is such an antidote to the post-confessional poetry that's all about your broken heart - He's interested in history, geology, oceanography. His poems are based on the world, though I'm sure he's writing about himself' - Billy Collins. 'Simultaneously funny, sad, ironic, compassionate, mocking and spiritual. There is such emotional and tonal range...yet a definite common-sense, serio-comic down-to-earthiness lurks throughout the collection as if implying that we humans should know better, be above all the nonsense to which we seem endlessly addicted' - Sally Molini, Cerise Press. 'Lux prizes simplicity in language, and his deceptively plainspoken style allows for powerful images - Lucid and morally urgent poems' - Elizabeth Hoover, Los Angeles Times. 'Try Lux on for size. He'll pinch in places, soothe in others, but I predict one thing: you may never fit the same way in your own skin again' - Rita Dove, Washington Post Book World. 'Over the course of forty years and twelve collections of verse, Thomas Lux has created a body of work of such consistency and excellence that I sometimes fear he is the victim of his own success - Lux's consistency arises from a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one - But by the mid-1980s Lux had extricated himself from - the neo-surrealism and caffeinated absurdism that was all the rage in the late 60s and early 70s - the daftness and imagistic pyrotechnics of neo-surrealism were replaced by a more scrupulous (but every bit as inventive) approach to the image, and irony and whimsy by something that would best be described as wit - wit in the tradition of the metaphysical and cavalier poets. The poems now became more burnished, more linguistically sly, and - most importantly - aimed to tutor and to teach as much as to entertain - uniquely and resonantly vital' - David Wojahn, On the Seawall.