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BROOKS HAXTON has published eight books of poetry, a nonfiction account of his son's career in high-stakes poker, and translations from Greek, French, and German. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He wrote the script for a film on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, broadcast in the American Masters series. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, Haxton has taught for many years in the graduate creative writing programs of Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.
There's something bardic about Brooks Haxton's Mister Toebones, the way his little narratives spin toward bone-hard insight through almost-melody, beguiling music. The poems travel far-from a mollusk in the mouth of a lover to the desolate moons of Jupiter-but their music, the deceptively simple chords of real lived wisdom, is persistent. A short poem near the middle of the collection, 'A Cat Lover's Guide to the Bell Curve,' is alone worth the price of admission. Horace said good poems must 'delight and instruct.' Mister Toebones is full of very, very good poems. -Kaveh Akbar As gravity bends light, and levity lightens weight, so does the original, humane consciousness of Brooks Haxton, as he creates his own magnetic field-idiosyncratic, capacious, intimate, and at the top of his form. Reliably unpredictable in their connections, his lines follow nature's vagaries and his own. Indicting the violence he abhors, exploring the distant and the quotidian-Saturn and Snooks Pond, his poems restore proportion, always with candor but sotto voce 'so as not to spook the deer.' -Eleanor Wilner I have always known Brooks Haxton's work to be full of curiosity and vision about anything he turns his eye and thought to, but Mister Toebones takes that wild, lyrical, wayfaring intelligence even further. These poems explore the mysteries of our world, of the human and creaturely journey, ever more powerfully in lovely, musical lines. It's as if the poet has seen and done everything, knows gently everything. I loved this book. Brooks Haxton is one of our finest poets, and he has outdone even himself in this one. Read slowly, savor, and see. -Richard Bausch
