Facts about the Moon: Poems

True Dorianne Lux style. If You enjoyed "Smoke" and "What We Carried", this is for you.

Laux's voice is impeccably skillful in the American Grain. Her imagery dances nice as you please and her music is clean as a whistle. What's best here is her passionate commitment to and celebration of a healing process that entrusts poetics to the uncanny capacity of love to pull wholeness out of chaos and pain if only you stick with the quest. These poems encourage and nourish.

Speaking with authority from the first page, this collection is accessible, familiar, the poet's trenchant observations sitting like pearls upon the tongue, not precious, but the flawed ones that are left behind. Democracy requires open eyes and a willingness to suffer discomfort for its own sake, the burr of memory kept sharp: "... the woman with her purse clutched to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head shorn, a swastika carved in the stubble, staring you down... "You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled on the steps of the church." (Democracy) The title poem reflects upon the reality that the moon is receding from the earth an inch and a half each year, that one day in the distant future it will finally spiral out of orbit and "all land based life will die". The moon is our regulator, our constant companion, a mother we have treated badly, defied and scorned: "... a mother who's lost a child, a bad child, a greedy child or maybe a grown boy who's murdered and raped, a mother can't help it, she loves that boy anyway, and in spite of herself she misses him... ... and you know she's only romanticizing, that she's conveniently forgotten the bruises and the booze... and you want... to slap her back to sanity... ... and then, you can't help it either, you know love when you see it, you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull." (Facts About the Moon) Making peace with the years, Laux appreciates the value of the struggle, the small slivers that drive us from place to place for survival, leaving behind people, places, parts of ourselves: "... But I know its only luck that delivered him here, luck and a love that had nothing to do with me. Except that this is what we sometimes get if we live long enough. If we are patient with our lives." (Music in the Morning) Laux spares nothing in her observations, not nature, others or self, alert to sea changes, monitoring the world around her: "Go on, he beseeches,Get going, but the lone elk stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart. One stubborn creature staring down another. This is how I know the marriage will last." (The Crossing) This collection bears the ring of truth, a view of the world from the street, the earth, nature's embrace, beneath the eye of the watching moon. Feelings are dissected, offering images that inform and transform, the power of language enhanced by an unflinching honesty. This is a poet who isn't afraid to get her hands dirty or her heart broken, a survivor of life's brutality and bounty. Luan Gaines/ 2005.