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.
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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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