The Cradle Place

by Thomas Lux

Overview

The Cradle Place is a collection from Thomas Lux, a self-described "recovering surrealist" and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.

These fifty-two poems bring to full life the "refreshing iconoclasms" Rita Dove so admired in Lux's earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, humorous and edgy, and ever surprising.

These are philosophical poems that ask questions about language and intention, about the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. In the poem "Terminal Lake," Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark currents beneath the surface: "it's a huge black coin, / it's as if the real lake is drained / and this lake is the drain: gaping, language- / less, suck- and sinkhole." In the ominous "Render, Render," the narrator asks us to consider a concentration of the essences of our lives: all that is physical, spiritual, remembered, and dreamed for, melded together to make the messy self we present to the world.

Lux's voice is intelligent without being bookish, urgent and unrelentingly evocative. He has long been a strong advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture. The Los Angeles Times praises Lux for his "compelling rhythms, his biting irony, and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless." As Sven Birkerts noted, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547347080
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/06/2007
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	414 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.

Read an Excerpt

THE LATE AMBASSADORIAL LIGHT Light reaches through a leaf and that light, diminished, passes through another leaf, and another, down to the lawn beneath.
Green, green, the high grass shivers.
Water over a stone, and bees, bees around the flowers, deep-tiered beds of them, yellows and golds and reds.
Saw-blade ferns feather in the breeze.
And, just as a cloud’s corner catches the sun, a tiny glint in the garden—the milk of a broken stalk? A lion’s tooth?
Or might that be the delicate labia of an orchid?

SAY YOU’RE BREATHING just as you do every day, in and out, in and out, and in each breath: one tick of a shaving from a bat’s eyelash, an invisible sliver of a body mite who lived near Caligula’s shin, diamond dust (we each inhale a carat in a lifetime), a speck of scurf from the Third Dynasty (that of the abundant imbeciles), one sulfurous grain from the smoke of a mortar round, a mote of marrow from a bone poking through a shallow grave, a whiff from a mummy grinder caught in a Sahara wind, most of the Sahara itself, inhaled in Greenland, sweat dried to crystal on your father’s lip and lifted to the sky before you were born—all, all, a galaxy of fragments floating around you every day, inhaled every day, happy to rest in your lungs until they are dust again and again risen.

DRY BITE When the krait strikes but does not loose his venom: dry bite. What makes the snake choose not to kill you? Not Please, not I didn’t mean to step on you. He may be fresh out: struck recently something else. But: if he withholds his poison, when does he do so and why?
Can he tell you are harmless to him?
He can’t swallow you, so why kill you?
There’s no use asking the krait: he’s deaf.
In that chemical, that split-billionth of a second, he decides and the little valve of his venom sac stays shut or opens wide.
Dry, oh dry, dry bite—lucky the day you began to wear the krait’s snake-eyed mark on your wrist and you walked down the mountain into the valley of that which remains of your life.

Copyright © 2004 by Thomas Lux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Table of Contents

Contents I The Late Ambassadorial Light 3 Say You’re Breathing 4 Dry Bite 5 Horse Bleeding to Death at Full Gallop 6 Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids 7 The Professor of Ants 8 Tactile 9 Ten Years Hard Labor on a Guano Island 10 Family Photo Around Xmas Tree 11 Rather 12 Portrait of X [III] 13 Three Vials of Maggots 14 Uncle Dung Beetle 15 The Gletz 16 Can Tie Shoes But Won’t 17 The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association 18 To Help the Monkey Cross the River 19 The Devil’s Beef Tub 20 Boatloads of Mummies 21 Thus, He Spoke His Quietus 22 The Magna Chamber 23 Birds Nailed to Trees 24 II Guide for the Perpetually Perplexed 27 If One Can Be Seen 28 The Year the Locust Hath Eaten 29 Burned Forests and Horses’ Bones 30 Letter to Walt Whitman from a Soldier He Nursed in Armory Square Hospital, Washington, D.C., 1866 32 Scorpions Everywhere 33 Myope 34 III To Plow and Plant the Seashore 37 Amphribrach Dance 38 Remora 39 National Impalement Statistics 40 Asafetida 41 174517: Primo Levi, an Elegy 42 Goofer-Dust 43 With Maeterlinck’s Great Book 44 Terminal Lake 45 The Chief Attendant of the Napkin 46 The Mountains in the River on the Way to the Sea 48 Reject What Confuses You 49 Flies So Thick above the Corpses in the Rubble, the Soldiers Must Use Flamethrowers to Pass Through 50 The Ice Worm’s Life 51 Provincia Aurifera 52 I Will Please, Said the Placebo 53 Hospitality and Revenge 54 From the High Ground 55 Dystopia 56 Monkey Butter 57 Breakbone Fever 58 Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me 59 Render, Render 60