Half Promised Land

by Thomas Lux

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544936867
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	375 KB

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Lux is an entertaining and inventive poet, painfully aware of the ``half promised land'' of death, which he opposes with a powerful imagination. We are all ``taught away from poetry'' in school, a situation Lux seeks to reverse by making us see through his eyes. Thus, darkness descends ``like ink/ dropped in sugar.'' The sky becomes ``a blue turtle,'' and an old barn begins ``to buckle like an ancient mule.'' Lux heightens the reader's sensory awarness on every page, evoking a whole range of imagery, not merely the visual but the auditory (``the whamp , whamp of an eel bashed on a wooden wharf'') and the olfactory (``smell/ of dirt on cabbage, the snow-/ on-your-arm smell''). These sensations, Lux reminds us, are precious precisely because they could be ``eaten'' up at any moment by ``Zyklon B, rads, megatons.'' Highly recommended for all collections. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

Library Journal