The Odd Last Thing She Did: Poems [Hardcover]

Brad Leithauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 1998

The Odd Last Thing She Did is Brad Leithauser's fourth book of poems--and his first collection in eight years.

Once again his poems evince a profound love of nature and a mastery of poetic forms. But they also reflect a deepening interest in storytelling, as Leithauser, who has also published four novels, here brings the narrative drive that propels his fiction into the domain of verse.

With compassion and imagination, Leithauser enters into the mysteries of lives both real and fictional: a middle-aged businessman who marries the identical twin of his deceased wife; a beautiful young woman whose life ends on a beautiful summer day; an elderly couple conducting a confused, touching romance in a nursing home; a young World War II soldier returning, wounded, to his fiancee.

And, as always, Leithauser's poems about the natural world are both coolly precise and warmly
engaging. A marsh in March, the play of sunlight underneath a bridge, a long-delayed spring, the contemplation of a moonless earth--all lead the poet, and ultimately the reader, into meditation and wonder.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Brad Leithauser is a novelist in addition to being a poet, so perhaps the strong narrative drive in his poetry is not surprising. In The Odd Last Thing She Did, he focuses his attention on two of his favorite subjects, nature and the strange workings of the human heart. The title poem, for example, explores the suicide of a beautiful young woman who is "So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three": "Attention will come to fix upon / This odd last thing she did: leaving / The car running, the headlights on. / She stopped--it will-transpire--to fill / The tank a mere two miles down the road." In 16 sonnet stanzas, Leithauser describes not only the young woman's actions but also the reactions of the public in the days that will follow: "What's truly tragic's never allowed / To stand alone for long, of course. / At each moment there's a crowd..."

Not every poem is quite so starkly tragic. In "Play" Leithauser contemplates a scene on the river from the vantage point of a canoe, and comes to some conclusions about the state of the universe: "...Might it not / be play, purely, that slides the one net / inside the other--the selfsame urge that bends / monkey tails into question marks, lends the clownfish bands/of motley, builds of blackness, the more multi-mooned / of our planets and the see-through microplace of a diamond?" Whether describing the love life of a notorious aunt or comparing a marsh in March to the aftermath of a party, Leithauser brings both an imaginative use of language and rhythm and a dramatic sense of story to every poem.

From Publishers Weekly

Most closely associated with the so-called new formalist school, which he helped to publicize in the 1980s, Leithauser is also an accomplished novelist (The Friends of Freeland) and essayist (Penchants & Places). His fourth collection, and first since 1990, confirms the self-confessed "obsession with rhyme and meter" (Interview, Jan. 27, 1997) that has made him a partisan in yesterday's spat between dogmatic vers-librists and equally dogmatic rhymers. If the new poems' old insistence on their own artifice lends them an air of obstinacy, Leithauser's strict forms well suit his modest lyrics of personal and genealogical history, and his focus (sometimes bitter) on the relations between men and women, men and nature, and men and men: "It's termite's labor?dark, clandestine, slow,/ No thanks and not a thing to show/ For it." Elsewhere, a young suicide leaves her car running, lights on, atop the cliff she's thrown herself from; a stranger saves the life of a wounded soldier (later, the speaker's father) on a beach; a senile widow calls her new "husband" by the former's name. Such kernels of narrative (which at their best recall the eerie verse-anecdotes of E.A. Robinson) draw attention to what's missing in this practiced but flat collection: surprise, wit, metrical delicacy. Readers for whom old-fashioned versification holds the glamour of a doomed cause will continue to applaud Leithauser's workmanship; readers who take for granted the deathlessness of poetic forms may see somewhat less cause for gratitude.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 83 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401415
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401411
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,939,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars bourgeois tripe, July 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Odd Last Thing She Did: Poems (Hardcover)

Brad Leithauser is the worst poet I've read in some time. Although there are many more carelessly self-indulgent poets writing, Leithauser is amazingly self-indulgent in terms of content: his poems have no purpose, not even to delight, and they seem simply smug when they do bother to adopt a tone. Thomas M Disch called Leithauser the prom king of American poetry--apparently because of Leithauser's earlier self-aggrandizing--but that description gives Leithauser the advantage of being interesting, which the poems in this book definitely are not.

4 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Please find this poet some subject matter!, November 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Odd Last Thing She Did: Poems (Hardcover)

When Leithauser's first book of poems, Hundreds of Fireflies, came out, many readers of poetry were delighted. His was a truly remarkable first volume of poems. But with each successive volume of poems, his work gets worse. How boring to read a book of poems you know must have bored the poet himself. He needs a subject matter that he can feel excited about because he is obviously not excited and his poems are all the more dull for it. A fine example of how all the form in the world, no matter how well the poet can command it, will not make bad poems interesting. Save your money and read this one, if interested, at the library.