Brad Leithauser — The Old Current

<p></p><p>As snappy as a dinner jacket's red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser's robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It's 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.</p><p>The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements. In the collection's two &quot;Darker&quot; sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-old's cry &quot;I love you so loud&quot; (&quot;A Young Farewell&quot;) to a reckoning with words formed &quot;Forty-Five Years On.&quot; Time presses in continually. In &quot;Abroad&quot; and &quot;At Home,&quot; 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 (&quot;The Old Current&quot;). Then, eight, and awed to remember the beauty of a lone jet overhead. With Updikean wordplay he recalls: &quot;Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom. / Behind me, five lives: two parents plus the three / Brothers with whom I share my room&quot; (&quot;A Single Flight&quot;).</p><p>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 &quot;Lighter&quot; interlude, we chance upon &quot;Icarus and His Kid Brother.&quot; We're treated to dactyls and lively quatrains, a sloppy kiss that's not quite bliss, musings on sobriety, and what comes to pass when &quot;life turns lickerish and liquory&quot; (&quot;Double Dactyls,&quot; &quot;Six Quatrains,&quot; &quot;The Muses,&quot; and &quot;Kisses After Novocaine&quot;). The energies yoked within Leithauser's formalism overflow formality.</p><p>Often elegiac and yet packed with humor, contemplative, consoling, and informed by the soul of a storyteller, Brad Leithauser's latest book of poetry is a warming, enrapturing read that returns us to the ebbs and flows of life's shores. &quot;I'm sixty-six,&quot; the author writes, &quot;and could anything / Reliably be more heartening / Than stray hints that life's brightest events. / Are, however far-flung, strung / Along a long old current?&quot;</p><p>Poet, novelist, essayist, <strong>Brad Leithauser </strong>is the author of eighteen previous books, most recently <em>Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. </em>He is a former theater critic for <em>Time</em>, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.</p><p>*recorded 3/22/2025</p>