'God Particles: Poems' by Thomas Lux

I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary

to be angry anymore, or vengeful,

or even forgiving, and He wanted each of us

and all the things we touch

and are touched by,

to have a tiny piece of Him,

though we are unqualified

for even the crumb of a crumb.

In "God Particles," Lux's 11th volume of poetry, readers are confronted by the brutality, banality and violence of the modern world. But they also encounter God particles scattered throughout -- an instance of kindness, a reason for joy, an impulse to forgive.

Lux, recipient of the 1995 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for "Split Horizon," is known for his uncompromising and bold poetry. The son of a milkman and a Sears, Roebuck & Co. switchboard operator, Lux grew up in working-class Massachusetts. From his first collection, "Memory's Handgrenade" (1972), his work reflected his concerns for social issues. His unflinching take on these subjects is tempered with humor and a stubborn hope for humanity. Despite his strong moral outrage, he avoids polemic and instead elicits the reader's sympathy. He writes -- in "Put the Bandage on the Sword and Not the Wound" -- "It must hurt, too, the sword" and acknowledges in "Stink Eye" that the evil eye "looks outward and leaks inward."

Lux prizes simplicity in language, and his deceptively plainspoken style allows for powerful images, such as in "The Utopian Wars,"

. . . the few remaining Jains

turn their cheeks

to reveal slashed and bloody jaws

from the last time

they turned their cheeks.

Throughout his career, Lux has used his work to chronicle and comment on our times -- their harshness, absurdity and brief moments of grace. In "Jesus' Baby Teeth," he writes about selling sacred relics on EBay. In addition to skewering the commercialism of modern Christianity, he crafts a moment of lyric intensity in the final -- and unsettling -- image, of Jesus' thumbnail: "Its bright moon is half risen above the horizon / but not one star / in its cracked, blackened sky." Many of his poems have that pan-and-zoom quality, with the poem zeroing in on a particularly telling or disturbing image. "Gravy Boat Goes Over Waterfall," a surrealistic poem about a strange cast of characters (including a rat in a sailor suit) going over a waterfall, ends by focusing on a woman "sewing, in her lap, / a tiny blue suit. Too small, / . . . even for a doll."

Given his conversational style, Lux's attention to craft can go unnoticed. But his interest in sound is undeniable in his rhyme of "small" with "doll." Sonically, it creates closure -- yet the image of the miniature suit is unnerving, challenging the conclusivity of the rhyme. This push-pull in Lux's work leaves the reader waiting for the other shoe to fall. His line-breaks also create a sense of suspension. Resolutely free-verse, his poems can seem erratic; long lines next to short, stark enjambments that break adjective from noun in phrases such as "gold / fish" or "bread / pudding." Far from arbitrary, the breaks fit the poems' sense of a world off-kilter.