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After starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux 'drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui.' The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. He uses humour or satire 'to help combat the darkness - 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 humour.' Each of Lux's multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. 'Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,' says Lux, 'a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he's goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.'
Price: $18.95
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date:
19 November 2014
ISBN: 9781780371153
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
Thomas Lux (1946-2017) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to working-class parents. He was raised on a dairy farm. He studied at Emerson College, Boston, and later, briefly, at the University of Iowa. He taught for 27 years at Sarah Lawrence College, and did spells of teaching at many other universities across the States before becoming Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of Poetry@Tech at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
He published twelve collections of poetry. His "switchover" collection was Half Promised Land in 1986, which marked a sea change in his work. Split Horizon in 1994 won him the Kingsley-Tufts Award, making it possible for him to devote much more time and energy to his poetry at a crucial stage in the evolution of his work. His later books include New and Selected Poems 1975-1995, published in 1997, which shows the poet before and after his "recovery" from Surrealism, and was followed by The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004), God Particles (2008), Child Made of Sand (2012) and To the Left of Time (2016). He published two books of poetry in Britain, The Street of Clocks - from Arc in 2001 - and his Selected Poems (2014) from Bloodaxe. He also edited I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems of Bill Knott (2017).