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MacArthur Fellowshipwinning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in more than a decade, a collection that recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age. As snappy as a dinner jackets red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithausers robust felicity is a balm in grim times. Its also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as with deft care Leithauser easily, often unexpectedly, juggles off-rhymes and old forms and new. The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements. In the collections two Darker sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-olds cry I love you so loud (A Young Farewell) to a reckoning with words formed Forty-Five Years On. Time presses in continually. In Abroad and At Home, the author shows us himself, in younger form: sixty-six, then twenty-seven, catapulted back in memory to Tokyo by a single bite of food (The Old Current). Then, eight, and awed to remember the beauty of a lone jet overhead. With Updikean wordplay he recalls: Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom. / Behind me, five lives: two parents plus the three / Brothers with whom I share my room (A Single Flight). As Leithauser takes the measure of a world expanding behind him, he manages to become weightless, freer, wild again. He also refuses to give up second chances. In the Lighter interlude, we chance upon Icarus and His Kid Brother. Were treated to dactyls and lively quatrains, a sloppy kiss thats not quite bliss, musings on sobriety, and what comes to pass when life turns lickerish and liquory (Double Dactyls, Six Quatrains, The Muses, and Kisses After Novocaine). The energies yoked within Leithausers formalism overflow formality. Often elegiac and yet packed with humor, contemplative, consoling, and informed by the soul of a storyteller, Brad Leithausers latest book of poetry is a warming, enrapturing read that returns us to the ebbs and flows of lifes shores. Im sixty-six, the author writes, and could anything / Reliably be more heartening / Than stray hints that lifes brightest events. / Are, however far-flung, strung / Along a long old current?
MacArthur Fellowshipwinning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in more than a decade, a collection that recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age.
As snappy as a dinner jackets red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithausers robust felicity is a balm in grim times. Its also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as with deft care Leithauser easily, often unexpectedly, juggles off-rhymes and old forms and new.
The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements. In the collections two Darker sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-olds cry I love you so loud (A Young Farewell) to a reckoning with words formed Forty-Five Years On. Time presses in continually. In Abroad and At Home, the author shows us himself, in younger form: sixty-six, then twenty-seven, catapulted back in memory to Tokyo by a single bite of food (The Old Current). Then, eight, and awed to remember the beauty of a lone jet overhead. With Updikean wordplay he recalls: Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom. / Behind me, five lives: two parents plus the three / Brothers with whom I share my room (A Single Flight).
As Leithauser takes the measure of a world expanding behind him, he manages to become weightless, freer, wild again. He also refuses to give up second chances. In the Lighter interlude, we chance upon Icarus and His Kid Brother. Were treated to dactyls and lively quatrains, a sloppy kiss thats not quite bliss, musings on sobriety, and what comes to pass when life turns lickerish and liquory (Double Dactyls, Six Quatrains, The Muses, and Kisses After Novocaine). The energies yoked within Leithausers formalism overflow formality.
Often elegiac and yet packed with humor, contemplative, consoling, and informed by the soul of a storyteller, Brad Leithausers latest book of poetry is a warming, enrapturing read that returns us to the ebbs and flows of lifes shores. Im sixty-six, the author writes, and could anything / Reliably be more heartening / Than stray hints that lifes brightest events. / Are, however far-flung, strung / Along a long old current?