Child Made Of Sand: Poems

By Thomas Lux

Reader’s familiar with Thomas Lux’s quick-witted images ("Language without simile is like a lung/ without air") and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers") will find in his new collection, Child Made of Sand, not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of America’s most inventive and humane poets, but they will also find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "West Shining Tree," we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "I’ll head dead West and ask of all I see:/ Which is the way, the long or the short way,/ to the West Shining Tree?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780547581019

Thomas Lux

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Book preview

I

THE MOTHS WHO COME IN THE NIGHT TO DRINK OUR TEARS

always leave quenched,

though they’re drinking,

in composition, seawater,

which does not make them insane

as it does parched humans when we we

drink it, even

with our big, big bodies.

If you knew

a leper’s tears do not contain

the bacillus leprae,

would you let him weep on your chest?

Let the moths come, let the sandwoman and -man come,

let Morpheus and Dreamadum come

unto me, and my beloveds,

let the moths come

and drink of the disburdening waters.

THE LITTLE THREE-HANDED ENGINE THAT COULD

I give the engine an extra hand, one more than Milton

gave his in the lines from Lycidas:

But that two-handed engine at the door/

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

Scholars disagree on the exegesis

of these lines: the dual-edged sword

of the archangel Michael? the two houses of Parliament?

death and damnation?

I’d say they’re each right, as right

as right is possible,

and add: There’s a man at the door

and he wants to kill you!

I’ve given him an extra hand—two to smite with swords

and one to smite, as well, with a dagger.

Have you ever tried to read Lycidas?

No wonder Robert Lowell, manic

as a buzz saw, tried to rewrite it!

It’s a hard haul through our early

Reviews for Child Made Of Sand

[smileydq · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was not familiar with the poetry of Thomas Lux before I received this book - I will say that after reading 'Child Made of Sand', I will definitely be looking for more of his works. This collection is all about memories, about looking back with a wiser eye on some of the most trivial yet key moments in a life. His language is quiet as he describes the unfettered emotions and mundane observations of childhood; at the same time, his line breaks are so carefully timed and his images so vividly written that even the mundane is beautiful. Lux's narrative is accessible and humorous, and surprising. He is clearly influenced by some of the great poets of the past, and pays tribute to them in his works. My one clear criticism is that he seems to take himself a bit too seriously, and I thought some of the poems in the collection seemed less a part of the cohesive whole. I give this book 3 stars - I definitely want to read more from Lux, but I doubt this will be my favorite of his collections.

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been exercising my poetry muscles and was excited to see this slender volume of 42 poems -- my first exposure to Thomas Lux.It’s an accessible collection -- short, readable entries that resonate with layered meaning. In fact, many are narratives and end with surprises that pulled me right back to the first line to reread with new insight. Lux muses on disability and mortality; gives homage to poets, writers, poems and literature; reminisces; vents anger. As collections go, what strikes me here is not that I have several whole poems I’d like to post, but that I marked striking passages in a dozen poems.Lux can delight with a single word --Penultimatum-- and provoke thought --{…}the weightof the ink (oh, I praynot the pixels!) on an execution order-- and get the sense detail just right --The dust motes of mud at a pond’s bottom,sluggish river, or swamp. The finest, most etherealof muds, rising in soft pinheadsfrom the density below; the fog of mud, what firstgrips your ankle so whisperly, a little warmerthan the water above it, a satiny sock-- and morph dimensions --I read it all morning and I read it all night.The next day all dayand 100 miles into the dark-- and even rhyme -- {…} If I live a hundred lives,then I’ll know more truths, maybe, and lies,to write my memoir, novella-sized. (Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)