The Cradle Place: Poems

The Cradle Place is the new collection from Thomas Lux, a self-described &quot;recovering surrealist&quot; and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.<br> These fifty-two poems bring to full life the &quot;refreshing iconoclasms&quot; Rita Dove so admired in Lux's earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, humorous and edgy, and ever surprising.<br> 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 &quot;Terminal Lake,&quot; Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark currents beneath the surface: &quot;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.&quot; In the ominous &quot;Render, Render,&quot; 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.<br> 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 &quot;compelling rhythms, his biting irony, and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless.&quot; As Sven Birkerts noted, &quot;Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends.&quot;