Luna Moth & Other Poems

In his latest collection, Steve Luxton navigates the mid-passages, facing what his favourite character, the notorious Doc Holliday, terms "the wasting diseases: Life, sonofabitch Fate, Love". Pieces both lyrical and serio-comic weigh sickness and personal mortality, the death of a shell-shocked father, and the shenanigans of this Age's 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 "stranger by far / than salvation or personal immortality". Nevertheless, though Fear may be "the only deity, first and last", Luxton also celebrates the deep beauty in the recesses of nature, and, redeemingly, "a little companionship." With both formal and experimental elements, these vividly figured, emotionally compelling poems tantalisingly sing and tartly satirise.

About the Author :
Steve Luxton was born in Coventry, England, immigrated as a child to Toronto, Canada. He gained a BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto, and an MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University where he studied under the poets W.D. Snodgrass and Phillip Booth. He has taught literature and creative writing at Champlain, Vanier and John Abbott Colleges, as well as at Bishops and Concordia Universities. In addition to the chapbook, Torrents Gate: Thomas Wolfe Visits Quebec, he has published five volumes of poetry: Late Romantics (with Robert Allen and Mark Teicher), the hills that pass by, Iridium, Luna Moth and Other Poems, and In the Vision of Birds. In recognition for his energetic support and promotion of English-language literature in Quebec, he was awarded the Quebec Writers Federations Judy Mappin Community Prize. He lives with his wife the poet Angela Leuck in the Eastern Townships village of Hatley."

Review :
"The 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 'terror and delight' (what more could we want?) and the birth of a perspective on the whole world." -- The Montreal Review of Books, Spring & Summer 2005 "'Silver Whiskers' displays the figure of a dead mink found in a cedar hedge who 'waxes pharaoic'.... With the dead animal being viewed with such curious, respectful interest, the apt comparison is a credit to both pharoah and animal. " -- Books in Canada, October 2005 "Luxton 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." -- Gazette, July 2005 "Luxton's incredulities at human habit and routine can be as light, as familiar as Doc Holliday's western spit, or dark as Hermann Goering's assisted suicide." -- U of T Quarterly, Winter 2006 "The 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 'terror and delight' (what more could we want?) and the birth of a perspective on the whole world." -- The Montreal Review of Books, Spring & Summer 2005 "'Silver Whiskers' displays the figure of a dead mink found in a cedar hedge who 'waxes pharaoic'.... With the dead animal being viewed with such curious, respectful interest, the apt comparison is a credit to both pharoah and animal. " -- Books in Canada, October 2005 "Luxton 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." -- Gazette, July 2005 "Luxton's incredulities at human habit and routine can be as light, as familiar as Doc Holliday's western spit, or dark as Hermann Goering's assisted suicide." -- U of T Quarterly, Winter 2006