Thomas Lux’s “Child Made of Sand”

As I get older, I find myself thinking more about my childhood than I did in my 30s and 40s. Perhaps I was too busy then, too caught up in career and family and life. As I get older, though, I find myself thinking about my grandmothers, my childhood friends, my extended family and scenes from childhood I hadn’t thought about in years.

Thomas Lux teaches at Georgia Institute of Technology, is a former Guggenheim fellow and the recipient of three National Endowment for Arts grant, and has published 12 books of poetry. I read his new collection of poems, Child Made of Sand, and I found I’m not alone. Many of the poems are about childhood, family, and relationships buried in the past, and how they collectively become memory. A fishing trip, the nicknames of boyhood friends, the farmhand working on the family farm, what the school cafeteria workers were called, a flower found in the forest, how dead horses were buried – all have become poems, powerful poems, poems that stimulate, and perhaps shape, the poet’s memory, and our own.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.