The prolific Lux (The Street of Clocks
) should please but may not surprise his many admirers with this 11th book, accessible and surrealist-influenced. Lux begins on a personal note, with a sentimental elegy for the New England poet and critic Peter Davison, “the gentleman who spoke like music.” By the end of the book, though, he has depicted little of his external life, few facts and stories about himself, and yet revealed a whole personality through dreamlike scenes, jokes and a persistent grimness. In “The Republic of Anesthesia,” evolution creates “arid hairsplitting” amid cruelty, as ”One frog eats another frog.” Lux favors an unobtrusively fluent free verse, whose motions and line breaks focus less on sound than on image and tone. Reminiscent sometimes of a darker Billy Collins, sometimes of an easier-to-follow James Tate, Lux mixes deep gloom with a broad sense of humor, confessing his “Autobiographophobia” (“I will not confide/ my serial poisoning of parakeets”), contemplating “black thoughts... remedyless and truculent,” depicting an ideal library beside a nightmarish zoo or musing on dilemmas few of us will ever face: “How Difficult/ for the quadriplegics to watch/ the paraplegics play.” (Mar.)
