Finding pieces of hope in a brutal world

THE God particle (so dubbed by Nobelist Leon Lederman) is perhaps the most important (and most elusive) elementary particle in modern physics. Without it, scientists can’t explain why other particles have mass. But no one has yet proved it exists. In the imagination of poet Thomas Lux, the God particle becomes an allegory of a world so chaotic it seems God has exploded. Rather than conceding that ours is a Godless universe, Lux writes:

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.

In a 1998 New York Times interview, Lux said of difficulty in poetry, “We confuse obscurity with originality.” For Lux, clarity in writing doesn’t mean dumbing down the poem. His ideas are complex, but his narratives and images are absolutely clear. This simplicity is crucial in his explicitly allegorical poems -- say, “Mole Emerging From Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916” in which the mole exemplifies bystanders caught up in war, or “Lump of Sugar on an Anthill,” in which ants who ignore the needy are threatened by rain. In the end, “they will drown -- in sweetness, / but drown, nonetheless.”

Certain of these poems deal explicitly with how Lux views the poet’s role. He advocates poetry that is direct, musical and relevant. For him, aesthetics is a matter of life and death. In “Peacocks and Twilight,” he writes in the voice of a boy shooting these ostentatious birds. The boy tells us that his father didn’t like them:

. . . something to do

with loathing cheap beauty, the meretricious,

which I must have inherited,

or else I love to hear and see

the peahens weep.

Lux too loathes “cheap beauty,” but he writes against the violence and cruelty here -- and throughout, in these lucid and morally urgent poems.

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Elizabeth Hoover’s work has appeared in the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Poets & Writers magazine.