Collected Poems

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The publication of Alexander Theroux’s Collected Poems, a gathering of more than 660 poems, an astonishing creative output, will be among the major literary events of the year. Here is a full cornucopia of sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, triolets, pure, satires, narratives, dramatic monologues, fanciful meditations, flytings and harangues, ruminations on death and lost love, and no end of lyrics both beautiful and fierce. Taken altogether they contrive to make up a record of the author's deepest thoughts and reflect the dramatis personae of his life. Theroux captures in his work those rare, frail, but precious truths, inaccessible to the common run of men that would otherwise have vanished into nescience. Sardonic, astute, impertinent, tender, clever, warm-hearted, delphic, truculent, comic, defiantly aggressive, and often achingly personal, he shows an intensity of observation and invention.

"[Theroux's] humor can vary from the trans-linguistic to an imaginative jeu d’esprit..." – The Washington Post Book World

The Endpaper Map in Winnie-the-Pooh

Children make complete sense of it.
Its signs are continuous with our dreams,
like clowns stenciled on our cribs

or pastel colors, and show us
frankly the way to go home. No better clue
to where I felt I needed to be,

also convincing me I belonged,
left better traces. That ladder. Those
steps. The location of things.

Dark forests acting as an embrace
was something Wagner knew and Shakespeare,
legislating a syntax especially

all lonely children love for whom
any woodland vision more than anything
makes a drapery of their dreams.