To The Left Of Time

By Thomas Lux

A brilliant new collection of poems by Kingsley Tufts Award–winning poet Thomas Lux

With To the Left of Time, Thomas Lux adds more than fifty new poems to his celebrated oeuvre. Broken into three sections, these include semi-autobiographical poems, odes, and a final section that delves into a variety of subjects reflective of Lux’s imaginative range. Full of his characteristic satire and humor, this new collection promises laughter and profound insight into the human condition.

To the Left of Time is a powerful addition to the work of one who has been widely praised for his ability to offer image- and metaphor-driven visions as well as lines of plain language and immediacy. This collection proves that Lux’s work will continue to inspire readers for decades to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544649668

Thomas Lux

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.

Book preview

I

Cow Chases Boys

What we were thinking

was bombing the cows with dirtballs

from the top of the sandbank,

at the bottom of which ran a cave-cold

brook, spring-born.

We knew the cows would pass below

to drink, and we’d pried our clumps of dirt

from a crumbling ledge. Here,

August lasted a million years.

There was no we, I can tell you that now.

I did this alone. At one cow

I knew as old and cloudy-eyed,

I threw the dirtballs as if it were a sport

at which I was skilled.

Boom, a puff of dust off her hip, boom, boom: drilled

her ribs, and neck, and one more

too close to where she made her milk.

She swung around and chased me up an apple tree.

Her rage surprised me, and her alacrity.

She looked up. I looked down at her.

As such with many things, I did this alone.

We both knew we’d soon be called home.

Haystack of Needles

With the loft full, stacked with bales

almost to where the bats hung,

the barn exhaled

hay-smell, which filled and built

an ache in our lungs.

Some bales broke open and made piles of loose hay,

which we gathered into one great mound

and then climbed to the top of the bales

(we’d made a kind of stairway)

and jumped. We wanted to land feet-first,

or sitting, and not on the heads

of those who leapt before us.

Not one of us was dumb enough

to try a flip, or dive: You’ll break your neck!

or You’ll put an eye out! we heard too often.

With whom did I take these leaps?

My friends, my cousins, and a neighbor girl.

She kissed me back. I’d kissed her first.

That night, in the bathtub, a hundred tiny hay-cuts

on my arms, neck, knees, sang

kiss me again, kiss me—and each one stung.

Nullius in Verba (Take Nobody’s Word for It)

Don’t recall reading that in HS Latin class.

If implicit could be nailed to the wall, it was implicit

you took the teacher’s word for it.

I was a poor student

and needed extra tutoring.

On Saturday mornings,

a defrocked priest in the family

drilled me at his mother’s house.

Nullius in verba never came up.

I required help with algebra, too.

I didn’t believe an x could equal a y.

I still don’t. In fact, I believe

algebra is a conspiracy,

of what and by whom I can’t say here,

but I have proof. Latin, at least, is a language.

A good language, and it isn’t dead.

Read Catullus. Take my word for it,

it’s anything but dead!

Indigo Felix:

The fruitful search (may each search

for a child be fruitful!), now

the motto of modern-day dowsers,

those who look for water with a forkèd stick.

Some say it doesn’t work, and many proved

it might. Well diggers hold secrets, and to dig

and drill so deep, through dirt and rock,

they must know where the water hides,

where it runs coldest, and clear.

I

Reviews for To The Left Of Time

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection of 55 poems is a mix of recollections from Lux's life; appreciations for objects and people and situations; and things he’s noticed or imagined. Some have narratives that drew me in and through, and Lux continues to delight with sudden illumination -- whether of a fact or a truth -- for example, in these passages snipped from different poems:... {Lichen} helps stone turn back to soilso slowly the stone doesn’t notice, ...-----Grade schools’ large windowsweren’t built to let the sunlight in.They were large to let the germs out. ...-----... I loved to touch my child’s foreheadfor fever and the feeling of finding none.-----... Praise all scars, which, by definition, revealthat something, one thing, onething minimum, is healed.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)