Luna Moth and Other Poems

In his latest collection, Steve Luxton navigates the mid-passages, facing what his favourite character, the notorious Doc Holliday, terms ìthe wasting diseases: Life, sonofabitch Fate, Love.î Pieces both lyrical and serio-comic weigh sickness and personal mortality, the death of a shell-shocked father, and the shenanigans of this Ageís public life. In Luna Moth and Other Poems, the poet, by now well tutored in human fragility and frailty, discovers that being alive at all in this very odd world seems ìstranger by far / than salvation or personal immortality.î Nevertheless, though Fear may be ìthe only deity, first and last,î Luxton also celebrates the deep beauty in the recesses of nature, and, redeemingly, ìa little companionship.î With both formal and experimental elements, these vividly figured, emotionally compelling poems tantalizingly sing and tartly satirize. Critical Comment ìThe book opens with a poem in which the son recalls an incident at the age of four: his father lifted him to the top of a seven-foot hedge and left him there for a while. The vertiginous experience was frightening, but it offered ëterror and delightí (what more could we want?) and the birth of a perspective on the whole world.î ó The Montreal Review of Books,Spring & Summer 2005 ìëSilver Whiskersí displays the figure of a dead mink found in a cedar hedge who ëwaxes pharaoicí.... With the dead animal being viewed with such curious, respectful interest, the apt comparison is a credit to both pharoah and animal. î ó Books in Canada, October 2005 ìLuxton can turn inward questingly when his own condition threatens to pin him as a butterfly is pinned..., and he embraces a natural world that will always hold sway among poets. Keenly conversational, Luxton's is a colloquial voice.î The Montreal Gazette