The Street of Clocks

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.