... unflinching ... Helpless but not hapless, [Laux] deftly writes of heartbreak—the absolute, gutting, severe loss of the one who brought her into this world ... Laux is majestic ... The elegies accumulate, settle into our throats, drill down—her selected poems are gorgeous to revisit, but these new pieces are symphonic—and they become a perfect coda of grief.
Laux writes with startling directness of the physical and sexual abuse she and her sister suffered at the hands of her father ... But there are other poems, just as frank and openhearted, that celebrate the wondrousness of sex (so skillfully that fiction writers should take note) ... Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise — and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom ... Laux’s new poems arrive at the end of the collection as a perfect finale, which benefits from what we now know of her life ... [Laux's poems allow us to] understand the bewildering complexity of this act of posthumous forgiveness, as well as the staggering generosity of the poet who committed it.
... [Laux] moves us ... [Laux] captures human sentiment and weaves emotions into multisensory landscapes with accurate details. Rich with detailed, layered poems, Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems is a collection of Laux’s finest ... Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems is a necessary addition to a home library. The poems demand multiple reads, and they will never escape one’s memory; they are permanent.
... poems that are clear, compelling and insightful ... Laux shows us how to endure hardships without losing humanity and compassion. This timely, beautifully crafted collection wonderfully balances light and dark.
The collection includes greatest hits from her previous five books and ends with 20 new odes to her complicated, unpredictable mother, an ER nurse from the Depression era. From formal sonnets to narrative sequences, Laux’s rhythmic lines merge song with story and illuminate the nature of grief and loss ... Laux anchors her poems in sensory details, transforming simple acts into lyric moments ... Laux’s language is precise and clear as she bears witness to the untamed within and without. She explores the complex, lived experience of longing ... We’re lucky. Only as the Day Is Long gives us Laux’s lyric powers evolving over the course of her career, resonant with courage and compassion.
... includes selections from [Laux's] five previous books of poetry and thirty-two pages of new poetry, some of her best to date. As with any collection of selected poems spanning twenty-nine years, we are able to see more clearly (by way of the close juxtaposition of poems separated by decades) constants and metamorphoses in poetic style and content ... Laux’s work from the beginning has excelled by way of voice and imagery: a distinct and consistent voice from book to book delights with imagery that is vibrant, original, and vivid. These qualities of imagery shine in every poem, but nowhere more so than in her portraits, especially of celebrities that all of us can picture, such as Mick Jagger and Cher ... Laux’s poetry, then, is decidedly written in the grain of her poetic era, not across that grain. As such, we can sometimes feel as if we’ve read these poems before in some way: their strategies often fall within a kind of group free-verse style that almost always feels vaguely familiar by way of strategy and movement, the kind of consensus style we might surmise frequently in the high-profile glossy magazines of our time ... In these ways, then, Laux’s poetry does not distinguish itself, except in those poems that rise above everything else she has written and astonish us with their achievement even within this received style. Such poems exist in this collection, enough to warrant a careful reading and maybe enough for her to emerge when all is done as one of the best in her group, the way a specific painter may have emerged as one of the best 'Impressionists' ... What strikes me in reading these poems chronologically is how the power of this poet’s imagination and apprehension of the unseen deepens as we proceed through to the end.
Some of the best poems here appear toward the chronologically organized collection’s end, where humor arrives despite a mother’s growing dementia ... This is a catalogue of honest work, from beginning to end.
