Child Made of Sand

June 1, 2012

Most of these free-verse poems evolve from questions or implied questions. Take "Where are the shoelaces of yesteryear, Gerard?"--the first line of "Rue de la Vieille Lanterne," written for the French poet Gerard de Nerval: although the question seems light, even flippant, the poem turns out to be about suicide and is dark indeed. Like much of the work in this 12th collection from Kingsley Tufts Award winner Lux (Split Horizons), this poem is an uneasy blend of sarcasm, pseudo-joviality, and noir. There are several allusions to other poets in the collection, including Robert Frost and William Blake, but overall the poems have a Sylvia Plath-like feel. They don't share in Plath's extraordinary imagery, though, so much as they inhabit her hard edges. The autobiographical poems tend to become wrapped in memories whose power never quite comes across. The strongest poems get their energy from figures of sound and wordplay--generally puns, consonance, and assonance. VERDICT The poems are not always successful, but when they work, they have an ironic edge that builds gradually and by suggestion until the poet pulls the rug out from under the reader with a final line whose mordant humor explodes in a light show that's anything but light.--Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., Maryland

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October 1, 2012
On the evidence of the titles in his twelfth book of poems, such as Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding Down Your Throat (a Belgian Euphemism) and Nietzsche Throws His Arms around the Neck of a Dray Horse, Lux is a gentle surrealist. His conceits are quirky. All but two of his poems are in free verse. All are roughly the same length, and they proceed like tall tales or shaggy-dog stories, the line breaks serving as a storyteller's natural pauses. Tone is the strength and the weakness of the poems. At their best, they laugh at life without diminishing or dismissing its consequences. In Dendrochronologist Blues, for example, the irony of felling an ancient tree to study it deepens when the research team plays poker, using the huge tree rings as chips. The narrator of the poem drolly observes, We let the rain and the stars / interpret the stump.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)