The world displayed in the poems of Thomas Lux is a fairly dangerous place, a half promised land, a region where turtles languish of thirst, where a lifebuoy crawls with spiders, where a moving car hits a moving moose and both survive, where what tends to terrify us tends also to make us feel safe, where "rattlesnakes feel at home, " where "your belief in justice/merges with your belief in dreams."

Half Promised Land

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.

Split Horizon

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.

The Street Of Clocks - Poems

God Particles displays the distinctive originality and unpredictability that prompted the Washington Post Book World to name Lux one of this generation's most gifted poets. A satiric edge, tempered by profound compassion, cuts through many of the poems in Lux's book. While themes of intolerance, inhumanity, loss, and a deep sense of mortality mark these poems, a lighthearted grace instills even the somberest moments with unexpected sweetness. In the title poem Lux writes, "there's no reason for God to feel guilt / I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore .

Livres