Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

'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.

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.'