Mister Toebones: Poems

(Hardback)

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In these marvelous pages, the award-winning poet turns a searching gaze toward the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. He looks back and forward in time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships. In these marvelous pages, the award-winning poet turns a searching gaze toward the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. He looks back and forward in time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships. Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores regions and forces that seem past endurance. Taking stock of threats against human survival, our own recklessness chief among them, these poems seek among visionaries and despots, scientific prodigies, murderers, and lovers what vitality may come from an alertness to all living things.

Reviews

Theres something bardic about Brooks HaxtonsMister Toebones, the way his little narratives spin toward bone-hard insight through almost-melody, beguiling music. The poems travel farfrom a mollusk in the mouth of a lover to the desolate moons of Jupiterbut their music, the deceptively simple chords of real lived wisdom, is persistent. A short poem near the middle of the collection, A Cat Lovers Guide to the Bell Curve, is alone worth the price of admission. Horace said good poems must delight and instruct.Mister Toebonesis 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 fieldidiosyncratic, capacious, intimate, and at the top of his form. Reliably unpredictable in their connections, his lines follow natures vagaries and his own. Indicting the violence he abhors, exploring the distant and the quotidianSaturn 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 Haxtons work to be full of curiosity and vision about anything he turns his eye and thought to, butMister Toebonestakes 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. Its 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

Author Bio

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.