rev. of Sunday by Thomas Lux

Sunday. As a title, it is somehow exactly right, and it has the curiously precise, poker-faced character of a good Lux poem. But Sunday is also, of course, what happens after Saturday night; it is both
the day of grace and everyone's day off, both the worst and the best of days, depending, of course, on who you are, and why. For F. Scott Fitzgerald it wasn't a day at all, but only a space between days; for Wallace Stevens its morning must have been, for a short while anyway, the whole thing. Sunday is, then, a paradox, a day to be reckoned with, and these new poems by Thomas Lux confront its ambivalence with a style hard, ironic and brilliant enough to include Sunday, and every other day as well, for this is mature work.

However, it was an earlier work,
Memory's Handgrenade (Pym-Randall Press, 1972), which made me first aware of Lux's particular poetic strengths. That book affected me as only a few other first volumes have -- though among these I feel I must mention at least one other here:
The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans by St. Geraud (Bill Knott), if only because Knott is a poet Lux has learned from.
Memory's Handgrenade, like
The Naomi Poems, was a sensation, a dark beauty: it was calm, cool, funny, wise, devastating, insouciant, grave and serious all at once. It was skilled
and spontaneous. When Bill Knott praised Lux's imagination as "poetic" rather than "prosaic," he was utterly correct.
Memory's Handgrenade did not reek of anything over-cooked, or tedious, or pretentiously deliberate. Reading Lux, I had the feeling that a poet had constellated at the age of twenty-five; I had the feeling that someone had
arrived.

Sunday should acquaint Lux with the larger audience he has deserved for some time now. This new book, like
The Glassblower's Breath (Cleveland State University Press, 1976), extends and amplifies Lux's characteristic poetic style and method. And though Lux fails, on occasion, he fails, it seems to me, because his style burlesques its own content, as it does at the conclusion of "Elegy for Frank Stanford" or "Poem Beginning With a Random Phrase From Coleridge." But even Lux's failures, and they are
few, are more interesting than some poets' successes. And, for the most part, this is a perfectly realized book in which Lux's exceptional imagination and inventive capacities are always exciting and always in evidence. In this volume, Lux has included a significant sampling of his versions of Dino Campana's
Orphic Songs -- poems which resemble, to a surprising extent, the textures apparent in the work of Lux himself. The effect of such an inclusion is that of greater harmony: the Campana translations reveal more of
both poets, and Lux and the doomed Italian poet strike a strangely resonant chord. And as always, there is Lux's humor:

Barrett and Browning

Mr. Browning helped but I think poetry

and hatred

for her father made Miss Barrett decide

to live. I think

I believe this dire couple.

And for once I believe

scholars:
they loved each other.

Elizabeth, of course, was smarter.

Robert, in the beginning, more ardent.

He was positive

and if his main inventions

were in a field

other than verse

he would have invented the wheelchair

and pushed her

relentlessly south and warmer.

I'm sure this was one reason why

she got up and walked alone. . .

Love helped, though, and they did

love each other -- bearing

one healthy but dull child

and many healthy poems,

which, of course, is never enough. . . .

If the tone of this poem is very much like the comic tones which persist throughout all of Lux's work, which serve to bind together the Self inhabiting such poems, I would like to stress here the serious nature of such humor. It is a humor which suspects that any tragic dimension is no longer possible, and that any longing for its return is, possibly, wasteful. But what the poet never forgets, amidst the laughter, is a kind of irrevocable sympathy that he seems to have been born with. Again and again, in
Sunday, it is this sympathy and compassion which mark the emotional journeys of the poems. Lux concludes "The Green" with:

and I believe when it is nearly dawn

a sparrow will land on the chair

on my porch The lower half

of her beak will be missing,

she can't eat,

and she is still alive.

But the sympathies would be worthless if Lux did not take on the desperations he catalogues. "Dawn Walk and Prayer" begins with the typically ludicrous landscape present in much of the poet's work, but Lux transforms not the landscape so much as the locus of his attentions until the absurdity of the beach is,
can be,, ignored.

Dawn Walk and Prayer

I step out onto the porch a few minutes

short of dawn

and hear the deaf

and nearly blind

old woman next door coughing.

Since this is the hour of exhaustion

and insomnia I'll walk for a while

on the beach since it's here

in front of me now as it usually

isn't. I love the light

at this hour -- I call it dim

disappearing. I also love the boats:

flipped over, their hulls

turnedto the sky. They're facts

of this world I would kiss

or at least caress: things that belong

underwater turned and touching

their opposite: air.

At this hour I could get away

with a kiss or caress.

But I won't try -- I'm thinking

about my neighbor. To be deaf

and practically blind

and now also with a cough:

That's why I'm making this prayer.

". . .
also with a cough." The only other instance of the word "also" working this powerfully, this cleanly, is in the work of Cesar Vallejo. If any change occurs in
Sunday it occurs because of the deepening of sympathy on the part of Lux. The chilled, perfect, reductively logical visions under which the earlier poems lived seem to have been replaced, in these new poems, by a more powerful, private pact with the humanity surrounding these poems. That sympathy has always been a large part of Lux's work, but the style is rarely, anymore, the hero here, and when the poem seems to be mostly style, as it is in "Flying Noises," the poem seems deficient by comparison. And although Lux's style is remarkably and wholly present, even in the sestina and pantoum he includes, the true heroes of
Sunday are figures worth the sympathy of any reader -- farmers; old women; the prisoner banging his cup against the bars of his cell because he likes the
sound it makes; Samuel Greenberg; Baudelaire; and the hunter who tries not to shoot anything, and whose indirection and good sense is the best defense of Lux's aesthetic I can think of.

Finally, if Lux has resisted the temptation to change as a poet, if his style has remained constant, his work as a whole has deepened and matured because of this. In a society which loves the new, whether it is a monster movie or a jogging shoe, such steadfastness may be one of the real virtues.