A Cradle Place by Thomas Lux

The first things I noticed about this book as a whole were the disturbing and/or comical titles of many of the poems. Titles like “Flies So Thick above the Corpses in the Rubble, the Soldiers Must Use Flamethrowers to Pass Through,” “Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me,” “guide for the Perpetually Perplexed,” “Three Vials of Maggots,” and many others. Here’s “Three Vials of Maggots.”

Three Vials of Maggots

were collected from the corpse

found lying in a field

near a small stream. From these the lab can tell

at what time the dead one died.

The have schedules, the flies.

Some lay eggs

which hatch to maggots

which consume the corpse. Others come to eat flies, maggots, eggs.

Hide beetles arrive to clean the gristle.

It’s an orderly arrangement.

What the maggots do

they do for you.

The first notable observation is how interconnected the title and poem are. The title explicitly states the occasion of the poem and also acts as the first line of the poem. Many times we say that any title acts as a first line and this is an extreme as the first line of the poem (the real one) would not make sense without the title beginning it. This heavy reliance on the title is a common practice of Lux’s in The Cradle Place as it appears in “Three Boatloads of Mummies,” “Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me,” “From the High Ground,” “The Ice Worm’s Life,” “The Chief Attendant of the Napkin,” “Burned Forests and Horses’ Bones,” “To Help the Monkey Cross the River,” “Can Tie Shoes but Won’t,” “Ten Years Hard Labor on a Guano Island,” and “Say You’re Breathing.” You can also tell by now that his titles are very unique, if not extremely odd.

I think that the defining characteristic of this poem, and many of the others, is its understated wit and dark humor. The poem is about a rotting corpse found near a stream, but Lux doesn’t discuss the person or his life. No, he discusses the usefulness of the insects that pick away at the corpse and ultimately states that the maggots are indeed helping us. Another dark but impersonal poem is “Hospitality and Revenge,”

Hospitality and Revenge

You invite your neighbor over

for a beer and a piece of pie.

He says words inappropriate

about your Xmas bric-a-brac.

You shoot him, three times, in the face.

While you complain to his first son

re high off-white-couch cleaning costs,

he shoots you in the face five times.

At your wake, your first son pumps eight

slugs behind his first son’s left ear.

Your wife invites your neighbor’s widow for tea.

Let’s see what exactly about the poem makes it so disturbing and cold. The tone of the poem is so detached because he never uses any words to describe the people dying or make any attempt to personalize the poem. The most we know about the neighbor is that he “says words inappropriate.” The use of slang words almost act as euphemisms such as when “your first son pump eight slugs.” These words devalue the victims and make the poem almost comical as that sentence seems straight out of a comic book caption. Also notice that the speaker writes in the second person saying “You invite,” “your Xmas,” “you complain,” etc. Regardless of the fact that the speaker isn’t necessarily addressing the reader, the nature of the second person itself will bring the reader’s own family into his/her mind making the poem most disturbing for him/her. However, the detached tone of the poem combined with the personal nature of “you” only augments the coldness of the poem.

The poem also makes a small observation on the nature of revenge, as the number of bullets each revenge-killing involves increases. “You” shoot “your neighbor” three times, his son shoots “you” five times, and “your” first son “pumps eight slugs” into the other son’s head. Many of the poems in A Cradle Place have disturbing subject matter yet the speakers handle it with no emotions and even hints of humor.