New Releases by Brad Leithauser

MacArthur Grant–winning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in over a decade, one which recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age. 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 over 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 collection’s two “Darker” sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-old''s 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 changes. In the “Lighter” interlude, we chance upon “Icarus and His Kid Brother.” 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 “life turns lickerish and liquory” (“Double Dactyls,” “Six Quatrains,” “The Muses,” and “Kisses After Novocaine”). The energies yoked within Leithauser’s formalism overflow formality. 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. “I’m sixty-six,” the author writes, “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?”

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they’ve been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, “not for its what but its how.” In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to “rhyme and the way we really talk,” Leithauser takes a deep dive into the architecture of poetry. He explains how meter and rhyme work in fruitful opposition; how the weirdnesses of spelling in English are a boon to the poet; why an off rhyme will often succeed where a perfect rhyme would not; why Shakespeare and Frost can sound so similar, despite the centuries separating them. And Leithauser is just as likely to invoke Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, or Boz Scaggs as he is Chaucer or Milton, Bishop or Swenson, providing enlightening play-by-plays of their memorable lines. Here is both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail.

A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he''s facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world''s most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don''t amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there''s another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie''s grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.

From one of our most universally admired poets: a generous selection from his five acclaimed books of poetry, and an outstanding group of new poems. From the outset, Brad Leithauser has displayed a venturesome taste for quirky patterns, innovative designs sprung loose from traditional forms. In The Oldest Word for Dawn, we encounter a sonnet in one-syllable lines ("Post-Coitum Tristesse"), a clanging rhyme-mad tribute to the music of Tin Pan Alley ("A Good List"), intricate buried rhyme schemes ("In Minako Wada''s House"), autobiography spun through parodies of Frost and Keats and Omar Khayyám ("Two Summer Jobs"). In a new poem, "Earlier," the poet investigates a kind of paradox: What is the oldest word for dawn in any language? The pursuit ultimately descends into the roots of speech, the genesis of art. "Earlier" is part of a sequence devoted to prehistoric themes: the cave paintings of Altamira, the disappearance of the Neanderthals, the poet''s journey with his teenage daughter to excavate a triceratops skeleton in Montana . . . The author of six novels as well, Leithauser not surprisingly brings to his verse a flair for compelling narrative: a fateful romantic encounter on a streetcar ("1944: Purple Heart"); the mesmerizing arrival of television in a quiet Detroit neighborhood ("Not Lunar Exactly"); two boys heedlessly, joyfully bidding permanent farewell to a beloved sister ("Emigrant''s Story"). The Oldest Word for Dawn reveals Brad Leithauser as a poet of surpassing tenderness and exactitude, a poet whose work, at sixty, fulfills the promise noted by James Merrill on the publication of his first book: "The observations glisten, the feelings ring true. These poems by a young, unostentatious craftsman are made to something very like perfection. No one should overlook them."

In this one-of-a-kind novel that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction, the hero is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895—a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman. Darlington’s Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that—vivid, accessible, and lush—imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel’s rich, taciturn, up-right, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous mentor; and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser’s embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world—into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present. In Darlington’s Fall, Brad Leithauser offers an ingeniously plotted story and the virtues long associated with his elegant stanzas: wit, music, and a keen eye for the natural world. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing.

In this roomy, bawdy, exuberantly comic novel, Brad Leithauser takes us to an imaginary island-country, Freeland, during a crucial election year. Freeland occupies its own place in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Greenland. A geological miracle, it is desolate ("What green is to Ireland, gray is to Freeland") -- and inspiring. The "friends" of the title are Hannibal, an expansive, lovable, unruly giant of a man who has been President of Freeland for twenty years, and Eggert, his shrewd, often prickly, always devious sidekick and adviser, who is Poet Laureate of Freeland and the book''s narrator. As the book opens, Freeland -- long happily isolated and stubbornly independent -- is in trouble. The sins of the rest of the world have begun to wash up on its shores in the form of drugs, restless youth, and a polluted, fished-out ocean. And, to add to the complications, when Hannibal, who has promised to step down as president, decides to run again, the opposition imports three "electoral consultants" from the United States. As the story unfolds, the histories of the friends are revealed. While Hannibal is Fate''s adored, Eggert travels perpetually under a cloud. Orphaned early, he must make his way by his wits. We follow him from his youth as he adventures Down Below (any place south of Freeland), collecting women, lovers, children, restlessly churning out fifty books in his search for love and admiration, returning home at last to raise a family and to serve his friend in his political hour of need. This huge, stunning, magical book brims with pleasures: delicious satire as the independent-minded natives meet the U.S.-trained "spin doctors"; a vibrant comic-strip vitality; and an edgy poignancy. Best of all, Leithauser has created a whole world, at once uncannily like and unlike our own. Readers who journey to Freeland will find it both a land of wonders and an ideal place from which to view the world they''ve left behind.

The Art Student''s War is Brad Leithauser''s finest novel to date, deeply moving in its portrayal of a young aspiring artist and her immigrant family during Detroit’s wartime heyday. The year is 1943. Bianca Paradiso is a pretty and ambitious eighteen-year-old studying to be an artist while her bustling, thriving hometown turns from mass-producing automobiles to rolling out fighter planes and tanks. For Bianca, national and personal conflicts begin to merge when she is asked to draw portraits of the wounded young soldiers who are filling local hospitals. Suddenly she must confront lives maimed at their outset as well as her own romantic yearnings, and she must do so at a time when another war—a war within her own family—is erupting.

Brad Leithauser’s “most satisfying collection in years” (Library Journal), a bracing poetic journey that begins in a warm, peopled world and concludes in a cooler and more private place, embracing love of the human and natural world in all its states.

According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan died at the age of 63, leaving behind three children, a wife, an ex-wife, a brother, a sister, and a life-long business career. According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan led a quiet, respectable, and unremarkable life. Our narrator, however, is about to discover that nothing could be further from the truth. Using Sultan’s obituary as a road map to the unknown terrain of the man himself, our narrator discovers dead-ends, wrong turns, and unexpected destinations in every line. As he travels from the bleak Michigan winter to the steamy streets of Miami to the idyllic French countryside, in search of those who knew Wesley best, he gradually reconstructs the life of an exceptionally handsome, ambitious, and deceptive man to whom women were everything. And as the margins of the obituary fill with handwritten corrections, as details emerge and facts are revised, our mysterious narrator–whose interest in his quarry is far from random–has no choice but to confront the truth of his own life as well.

A witty and worldly confection of light verse and delicate drawings, Toad to a Nightingale is a fantastic catalogue of creatures--plant, animal, and object--on whom poet Brad Leithauser has bestowed song and spirit and his brother Mark has endowed with beauty and bodily form. The verse is clear and charming, the drawings of extraordinary precision and invention. Framing this catalogue of surprises is a spirited exchange between the toad and nightingale, suggesting that a soiled toad can sometimes trump the celestial songbird.

"On the left of each spread is an eight-line poem; opposite it is a delicate, complementary pencil drawing, reproduced here in exacting duotone"--Publisher''s website, viewed on October 10, 2014.

In his masterly fourth collection, a poet known for his delight in language achieves an innovative fusion of the narrative and the lyrical in beautifully crafted poems that probe relations between lovers, husbands and wives, friends, enemies, fathers and sons.With compassion and imagination Leithauser enters into the mysteries of lives both real and fictional: a middle-aged businessman who marries his deceased wife''s twin; the suicide of a beautiful young woman; an elderly couple''s confused love; a young, wounded World War II soldier returning to his fiancee.As always, Leithauser''s poems about the natural world are precise and engaging. A marsh in March, the play of sunlight underneath a bridge, contemplation of a moonless earth, all lead the poet -- and the reader -- into meditation and wonder.

He brilliantly makes clear for the layperson the possibilities of computer chess and the future of thinking machines, and acquaints us with the biographies of three mathematical geniuses - Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and India''s Ramanujan.

A Washington lawyer struggles to find balance afterseeing the ghost of his dead wife.

The scenery of Iceland, the South seas, and the American South, the awakening of first love, and the meaning of speech are some of the topics treated in this collection of poems.

The story of a famous chess match played between a man and a computer chess program at M.I.T. back in 1993.

Brad Leithauser is among the most celebrated of the young American poets. Between Leaps is the first collection of his work to be published in Britain. The range of his subjects is wide, from delicate observations of nature, to impressions of Japan and lively accounts of summer jobs as a student in America.

Explores the delights and lessons of nature and the intricacies and wonder of things Japanese.