Volume 24 81
medium is the autobiographical lyric-narrative
poem, but one so thoroughly grounded in the real
world that it becomes a kind of transparent con-
tainer, transmitting experience with uncanny
immediacy.
Laux achieves this transparency through
scrupulous attention to detail. More than any
other poet I know, she locates her poetry in the
things of this world—the physical, the real, the
daily. Her long stanzas pulse with energy, mov-
ing toward the next revelation, sometimes before
we’re even ready:
Today, pumping gas in my old car, I stood hatless in
the rain and the whole world went silent—cars on the
wet street sliding past without sound, the attendant’s
mouth opening and closing on air—as he walked
from pump to pump, his footsteps erased in the rain—
nothing but the tiny numbers in their square windows
rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds glid-
ing by as I stood at the Chevron, balanced evenly on
my two feet, a gas nozzle gripped in my hand, my
hair gathering rain.
And I saw it didn’t matter who had loved me or who
I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick
beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds—nothing was mine.... (“After Twelve Days
of Rain,”)
Laid out as carefully as cards, meticulously
controlled through enjambments and pauses, the
details are the emotion in this poem. In this most
unlikely of settings, she hears her “actual, visceral
heart,” before the sounds of things going on around
her come through again, “... the slish of tires / and
footsteps, all the delicate cargo / they carried say-
ing thank you... .” Her only choice is to to go on,
climbing into her car “as if nothing had happened—
/ as if everything mattered....”
Laux’s voice has always been wise, deep and
completely unself-pitying. But there is in this col-
lection a certain fullness of spirit. In poem after
poem she recognizes and celebrates her ability to
survive and enjoy life. In “Singing Back the
World” a careful of women Mends bursts into
spontaneous song:
I don’t remember how it began. The singing. Judy at
the wheel in the middle of “Sentimental Journey.”
The side of her face glowing. Her full lips moving.
Beyond her shoulder the little houses sliding by. And
Geri. Her frizzy hair tumbling in the wind wing’s
breeze, fumbling with the words. All of us singing
as loud as we can. Off key. Not even a semblance of
harmony. Driving home in a blue Comet singing “I’ll
Be Seeing You” and “Love Is a Rose.”
A deep celebration of female friendship,
“[no]thing but [their] three throats / beating back
the world,” the poem is both praise song to and an
example of the ways creativity makes it possible to
go on.
In the sequence of poems about family that
makes up the central section of the book, Laux
muses on having a teenage daughter, on her own
mother’s ebony piano, on the adult world’s incur-
sions and intrusions into her childhood, in language
that is fierce, precise and loving. One of the things
I admire most about Laux’s work is that knowl-
edge, though it often comes painfully, is always
modulated by awareness that is somehow transfor-
mative: a twelve year-old looking at a sexually ex-
plicit magazine simultaneously dusts off his baby
brother’s pacifier each time it falls into the dirt.
And always there is the redemptive power of love.
In “Family Reunion,” having suddenly realized
there is no film in her camera, Laux writes:... I smile at my family, ask them to stay where they
are just a few minutes longer as I press the blank
shutter again and again, burning their images into my
own incorruptible lens, picture after picture, saving
them all with my naked eye, my bare hands the purest
light of my love.
I had the feeling as I read this poem and oth-
ers that the speaker has moved out from beneath
some burden—that she is, in some way, more fully,
more joyfully inhabiting the world.
The book opens with the speaker out in her
back yard at midnight, chasing away fighting
cats (“forty-one years old... / broom handle
slipping//from my hands, my breasts bare, my hair
/ on end, afraid of what I might do next”), and
closes with an immensely celebratory series of
poems on the mysteries of the body, love and
For the Sake of StrangersHer medium is
the autobiographical
lyric-narrative poem, but
one so thoroughly grounded
in the real world that
it becomes a kind of
transparent container,
transmitting experience
with uncanny immediacy.”