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.

From Library Journal
As one of New Formalism's most visible practitioners, Leithauser earned his laurels with deftly paced comic narratives of 1980s urban life and sharply etched lyrics that at their best evoked the luminescence of Marianne Moore's animal portraiture. But as New Formalism has gradually lost its novelty ("a companionable ease/ settles in"), Leithauser's fourth collection seems more comforting than combative. Gracefully rhymed quatrains and unflagging syllabics are now expected, and the poet fulfills those expectations with the "clean-/ angled precision life too seldom shows." Leithauser's view encompasses a range of human relationships?courtship in a nursing home, men duck-hunting, estranged brothers?with impressive breadth, but his "sharp ingenuities" continually draw attention away from the subject to the niceties of its rendering. Unlike, say, James Merrill's Leithauser's clever prosodic skills more often establish distance between himself and his subjects. As a hedge against sentimentality, the strategy may work, but it solicits flattery more than empathy.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NYCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Adam Kirsch
In an age of poetic license, he reminds us that craftsmanship is necessary, but not sufficient, for the writing of poetry.

From Kirkus Reviews
The fourth collection by the novelist (The Friends of Freeland, 1997, etc.) and MacArthur fellow demonstrates the same formal fluidity and clarity of expression as his previous books. But Leithauser is still plagued by an unbearable lightness, a simplicity never elevated by wit or profundity, just boyish puns and an occasional burst of ecstatic lyricism. Leithauser stays fairly close to his announced subjectthe relations of men and womenand mines his family history in support of his fathers wisdom: Men and women! Theres no end,/no end to what theyll do! His senile grandmother thinks a fellow old-age home resident is her long-dead husband; his father, wounded in war, displays old-fashioned gallantry on a streetcar; and his grandmothers sister, full of big-city dreams, turns to liquor after her beloved dies in WWI. The fine title poem, one of Leithausers strong, Frost-like narratives, tells the story of a young womans suicide in 1953a fully imagined tale of a postwar Ophelia. A number of gentle lyrics celebrate the poets wifeher eyes, an early kiss, words fumbled in love, and, on her birthday, a testimony of her strength. Poems about men among men seem to bring out Leithausers puerility, especially an ill-conceived three-part tale of a friends betrayal. Early memories of an astronomer uncle and beer-drinking with his father pale beside Leithausers more impersonal poems: a deft portrait of an aging hunter, a clever play on words in honor of Malcolm Lowry, and a perfect lyric on the sky over Shiloh as reenactment of war. Always agreeable, but Leithausers modest passions seldom compel. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"A rhyming family man, amateur cosmologist, and addict of intricate stanzas, Leithauser warms the past and present with his lovingly intense scrutiny and powerfully compressed phrases."
--John Updike

"A solid reputation for mastery is sustained and reconfirmed in this brilliant cluster of dazzling, touching, witty and deeply felt poems. Borne confidently on the strength of an unfailing talent, we are conveyed through the drunken arithmetic, along nimble caperings of the mind, to exotic margins of a world both delicate and adamantine, where it is revealed to us how perilously delight or heartbreak teeters on the pinpoint of a word."
--Anthony Hecht

Review
"A rhyming family man, amateur cosmologist, and addict of intricate stanzas, Leithauser warms the past and present with his lovingly intense scrutiny and powerfully compressed phrases."
--John Updike

"A solid reputation for mastery is sustained and reconfirmed in this brilliant cluster of dazzling, touching, witty and deeply felt poems. Borne confidently on the strength of an unfailing talent, we are conveyed through the drunken arithmetic, along nimble caperings of the mind, to exotic margins of a world both delicate and adamantine, where it is revealed to us how perilously delight or heartbreak teeters on the pinpoint of a word."
--Anthony Hecht

Book Description
Once again Brad Leithauser's 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.

From the Inside Flap
Once again Brad Leithauser's 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.

From the Back Cover
"A rhyming family man, amateur cosmologist, and addict of intricate stanzas, Leithauser warms the past and present with his lovingly intense scrutiny and powerfully compressed phrases."
--John Updike

"A solid reputation for mastery is sustained and reconfirmed in this brilliant cluster of dazzling, touching, witty and deeply felt poems. Borne confidently on the strength of an unfailing talent, we are conveyed through the drunken arithmetic, along nimble caperings of the mind, to exotic margins of a world both delicate and adamantine, where it is revealed to us how perilously delight or heartbreak teeters on the pinpoint of a word."
--Anthony Hecht

About the Author
Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of three previous volumes of poetry--Hundreds of Fireflies, Cats of the Temple, and The Mail from Anywhere--four novels, and a book of essays. He is the recipient of many awards for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

He and his wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, are the Emily Dickinson Lecturers in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College. They live with their two daughters, Emily and Hilary, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Play

I

Easily, first our red canoe's
upturned reinforced nose

coasts across the rounded rim
of the bridge's shadow, then a room-

like enclosure's thrown over our shoulders and we're
in on a sort of open-ended show, where,

back and forth on the rusted ceiling,
up-angling sunlight's sailing.Yet it's a harbor where, try as we might,
we can't hold our own, quite,

and though we paddle backwards, hard
toward the bow, we're spirited off--yard

by yard, driven irresistibly along,
back under the sky. The current's too strong.
II

Even so, we're under long enough to bring the scene
lastingly to life: a zone where the sun,

though splintered, crowns another domed firmament,
this one brown, and the river's roofed voices mount

to a ceaseless, clamorous hush . . . a place where
spiders in tatters live out a high-wire

existence, somehow coming to base
their very lives above the onrushing abyss.Upon the bridge's underside the broken sun, too,
throws a web, pliant and vast, and through

the spider-nets the solar-nets brightly go flying,
as if to show up the uselessness in anyone's trying

to snare, however fine the line unwound,
matters of spirit in the matter-bound.
III

--Or are we, in our rush to extract
lessons from the place, almost tricked

into missing the all-but-unmistakable? 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 micropalace of a diamond?What but play's at work, when an old bridge (one that must
groan and shudder each time, in a rolling hill of dust,

another flatbed truck comes heavily
rattling over) all the while turns out to be

undergirded by a mesh of wheeling
water-filtered sun across its nether ceiling?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Once again Brad Leithauser's 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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. (Sept.)

Library Journal

As one of New Formalism's most visible practitioners, Leithauser earned his laurels with deftly paced comic narratives of 1980s urban life and sharply etched lyrics that at their best evoked the luminescence of Marianne Moore's animal portraiture. But as New Formalism has gradually lost its novelty ("a companionable ease/ settles in"), Leithauser's fourth collection seems more comforting than combative. Gracefully rhymed quatrains and unflagging syllabics are now expected, and the poet fulfills those expectations with the "clean-/ angled precision life too seldom shows." Leithauser's view encompasses a range of human relationships--courtship in a nursing home, men duck-hunting, estranged brothers--with impressive breadth, but his "sharp ingenuities" continually draw attention away from the subject to the niceties of its rendering. Unlike, say, James Merrill's Leithauser's clever prosodic skills more often establish distance between himself and his subjects. As a hedge against sentimentality, the strategy may work, but it solicits flattery more than empathy.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Kirkus Reviews

The fourth collection by the novelist (The Friends of Freeland, 1997, etc.) and MacArthur fellow demonstrates the same formal fluidity and clarity of expression as his previous books. But Leithauser is still plagued by an unbearable lightness, a simplicity never elevated by wit or profundity, just boyish puns and an occasional burst of ecstatic lyricism. Leithauser stays fairly close to his announced subject-the relations of men and women-and mines his family history in support of his father's wisdom: "Men and women! There's no end,/no end to what they'll do!" His senile grandmother thinks a fellow old-age home resident is her long-dead husband; his father, wounded in war, displays old-fashioned gallantry on a streetcar; and his grandmother's sister, full of big-city dreams, turns to liquor after her beloved dies in WWI. The fine title poem, one of Leithauser's strong, Frost-like narratives, tells the story of a young woman's suicide in 1953-a fully imagined tale of a postwar Ophelia. A number of gentle lyrics celebrate the poet's wife-her eyes, an early kiss, words fumbled in love, and, on her birthday, a testimony of her strength. Poems about men among men seem to bring out Leithauser's puerility, especially an ill-conceived three-part tale of a friend's betrayal. Early memories of an astronomer uncle and beer-drinking with his father pale beside Leithauser's more impersonal poems: a deft portrait of an aging hunter, a clever play on words in honor of Malcolm Lowry, and a perfect lyric on the sky over Shiloh as reenactment of war. Always agreeable, but Leithauser's modest passions seldom compel.