The Street of Clocks [Hardcover]

Thomas Lux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2001

The poems gathered in THE STREET OF CLOCKS are lyrical monologues urgently delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against a vivid landscape--the rural America of Thomas Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border--these poems speak with mesmerizing intensity from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea. They address the snakes, parrots, or sand fleas living there, as well as their human cohabitants, who are sometimes benign, as in the beautiful title poem ("Meet me there, you remember, the corner / of Paris and Porter"), and sometimes emphatically not so. The language is distilled and musical, lucid and strange, playful and dead serious, and always specific. Thomas Lux's first all-new volume in seven years is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. As Sven Birkerts has written, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends. He has the stuff to win readers back from their unhappy places of exile."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mixing shock and tenderness in ways Lux fans have long loved, this new full-length work arrives six years after New and Selected Poems 1975-1995, and should enjoy a similarly warm reception. "Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires" envisions the vegetables as uneasy families, with "smaller yellow-green children" orphaned when the cukes are picked; "Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City" finds "his sister, Mathilde" trailing "little Tommy" as they fly through the heavens--"just as she did on earth." Instinctive fear of snakes, "Henry Clay's Mouth," the anti-saint called "Thomas the Broken-Mouthed," a local bookie, wheat fields on fire, orange roughy, "prolific squid" and a "Shotgun Loaded with Rock Salt" all appear in one or another of these broken-lined, sadder-but-wiser poems--some constructed around embittered stories, others around a single, titular image. Lux's titles and premises can seem more inventive than the poems he spins out from them: some seem to sacrifice intellect for charm. Moreover, Lux's anecdotal method and his gallows humor (both indebted to dedicatee Stephen Dobyns) can grow old by the end of the book, as when a baby "swallowed by a snake" prompts the poet to croon "bye-bye baby." (Apr.)Forecast: Lux, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, is a perennial finalist for prestigious awards; his semipopulist, semisurrealist project places him in the same ballpark, stylistically, as the big-selling Billy Collins, and he already has some following among younger readers. Genuine popularity may still prove elusive, however, without a reading on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion or the like.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In his first all-new collection since the award-winning Split Horizon (1994), Lux takes his readers on a wild ride, and because he writes with such nimble ebullience, it's a bit of a shock to find that death is the destination of a number of these counterintuitive poems. But there's nothing grim here, only astonishment at the fruits of Lux's fertile and surreal imagination. He envisions a poisoned shirt that leaves people dropping in its wake as its wearer walks by, a "library of skulls," a man snorkeling in a mountain lake overtaken by a rampaging wildfire, a war fought over a severed ear, a flood that leaves behind a "light blue ice tray, / birdhouse, the town clerk." His language is saturated with colors and sounds, his imagery as free and teasing as a strong breeze. And every few pages, the dazzled reader will come upon a poem of truly breathtaking beauty, such as the jazzy love song "The Corner of Porter and Paris." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 50 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (April 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618086242
• ISBN-13: 978-0618086245
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,975,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vultures and livers, September 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Street of Clocks (Hardcover)

This won't come as a surprise to those who know Lux's work, but *The Street of Clocks* is very good. This is, of course, also the guy who gave us "Commercial Leech Farming Today" (so much for those who say there's no new subject matter), so it always amazes me how many people don't know his work. But you should, all of you. I don't know anybody else who writes like Lux.

Describing his work, unfortunately, is more difficult than flinging around general superlatives. Often weird subject matter which nonetheless hooks into the same stuff we're all feeling: check. Unexpected vocabulary: check. But those features might be thought to equal only novelty (or at best a quirky vision appreciated only by a few isolated fellow nutcases) if it weren't for all the other stuff.

Other stuff. There's the voice, which you couldn't mistake in a thousand; in a period when an awful lot of poets sound an awful lot alike, Lux's voice is distinctive. (I'm not making this up.) That whole James-Wright-minor-melancholy tone that's so prevalent in folks coming out of workshops is absent in his poems, though it's not hard to see that Wright was an influence some way back. And there's the craft; Lux's line breaks are thought out in a way that too many poets' don't seem to be, and he manages formal verse as handily as free. (I think I'm quoting Lewis Turco when I remark that free verse isn't; and Lux knows it.) And there's the specificity which characterizes all good poets: to quote one of my favorites (from *Half-Promised Land*), "Yes!--it does, it does feel exactly fine/ crawling ashore, emptying the boots of water, and frankly/ here's to the clouds the color of bone,/ here's to the indecipherable path home,/ here's to the worm's sweat in the loam..."

See what I mean? That's sufficiently specific to crack your eardrum, with not an abstraction in the lot; and it is, believe it or not, formal verse (I read a Lux sestina without realizing what it was for at least four stanzas). And it's strange enough to make you laugh, a function which distracts you from noticing it's sufficiently (and simultaneously) poignant and celebratory to hook out your liver, a pang you notice just too late to forestall it. (Speaking of livers, there's a poem in *The Street of Clocks* with a lucky vulture in it. Now you know you can't pass that up.) And you can't imagine anyone else putting it just the way Lux does, but you know just what it means, and it makes you feel, in fact, at home. Right here. Seriously, folks, this stuff is good, and it's accessible, and people who hate poetry often like it anyhow. Buy it early and often.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Clocks Are Ticking, November 28, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Street of Clocks: Poems (Paperback)

THE STREET OF CLOCKS is all about aging, and by now the middle-aged author who once had the gift of youth in the palm of his hand is feeling death's nostrils breathing warm patterns of air on the back of his neck, and on even more intimate places. When you think of Sarah Lawrence and you think of "poetry" your mind stumbles on the name of Thomas Lux, for he's been there for so long that some younger students weren't even born when he started his lucrative tenure there. He can be hilarious, as when he describes humans as being the only animal who makes quotes marks with their fingers to indicate sarcasm, "bewilderment and awe." The young, in particular, warm to Lux because he sees the world from their point of view, as an infinitely strange arrangement of pleasures and tribulations, never to be exhausted.

This volume took six years to write, and it shows in the repeated thrusts and mechanical coughs of the verse style. Contrary to previous reviewers, I did not find Lux's language always specific. Sometimes it seemed vague, as though he were trying to describe dreamlike experiences or states of feeling for which language does not suffice. Have you ever read the German poet Stefan George? Sometimes, or so it seems to this reviewer, George was born again in upstate New York or wherever it was and suffered through the typical milkman's son's life until he found Sarah Lawrence the way george found his Maximin. His writing is filled with violence, like "Rommel's Asparagus," the punji-like sticks which ripped the underbellies out of enemy pilots.

All in all, he should stop it with the long hair, that makes him looks like he was part of ABBA.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take Your Time, May 24, 2001

By 

D R WALKER (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Street of Clocks (Hardcover)

Tom Lux's new book, Street of Clocks, allows its reader the luxury of a slow stroll down a familiar and comforting path. Its language is concise and uncomplicated, and its subject matter is clever, if not profound. Lux deals with such issues as fatherhood, citizenship, and personal insight without being overbearing or forceful. In fact, it is a delight to take your time wading through these thoughtful poems, like stepping into a cool fountain on a hot summer's day; be sure not to get lost in the shiny glitter that comes from some of the metallic detail of his poems, for it is sometimes blinding. This collection is many years in the making, but well worth the wait. Be sure to include this hardback in your permanent collection.