Selected Poems

Thomas Lux (1946-2017) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to working-class parents. He was raised on a dairy farm. He studied at Emerson College, Boston, and later, briefly, at the University of Iowa. He taught for 27 years at Sarah Lawrence College, and did spells of teaching at many other universities across the States before becoming Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of Poetry@Tech at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He published twelve collections of poetry. His "switchover" collection was Half Promised Land in 1986, which marked a sea change in his work. Split Horizon in 1994 won him the Kingsley-Tufts Award, making it possible for him to devote much more time and energy to his poetry at a crucial stage in the evolution of his work. His later books include New and Selected Poems 1975-1995, published in 1997, which shows the poet before and after his "recovery" from Surrealism, and was followed by The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004), God Particles (2008), Child Made of Sand (2012) and To the Left of Time (2016). He published two books of poetry in Britain, The Street of Clocks - from Arc in 2001 - and his Selected Poems (2014) from Bloodaxe. He also edited I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems of Bill Knott (2017).

'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.