
The Old Current
Brad Leithauser
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 84 pps., £9.99
MICHAEL YOST admires a poet’s orderly sensibility
Brad Leithauser’s new book is aptly titled. The simultaneity of old and new is at the forefront of this collection, and with good reason: most of the poems deal with the themes of memory, childhood, nostalgia, and loss. As the current of a river carries the past forward into the present, so this book makes the old new, and presents us with Leithauser’s unique and relatively unchanging style. Looking back on his older works, there’s a continuity in his style over the last 30 years. This bespeaks a poet whose style is a part of them, something achieved and conserved.
The book overall is very well-structured; that is, it is very clearly and thematically structured. Leithauser’s experience as a novelist shows here: the work is organized into chiastic parts, which taken together have a rising and a falling action.
The first part is “Darker,” where themes of birth and youth provide the top-note for a full-bodied occupation with the past. However, this section also introduces the themes of old age, of finality, which run throughout this book. The second section contains poems which spring from Leithauser’s time at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Thematically, we move from childhood to young adulthood, from infancy to activity. The best poems in these sections are mostly epigrams: ‘The Philosopher’s Walk’ and ‘The End of the Adventurer’ from Darker, and ‘How it Looks From Here,’ ‘The Third Suitor,’ and ‘A Beach of Big White Stones.’ It is no secret that that epigram, like hanging, has a way of sharpening the attention, and of forcing a poet towards a kind of formal and intellectual concentration he might not have elsewhere. This quality of attention and concentration is more absent from the poem that gives the book its title.
In general, however, Leithauser’s metrical style is a little unbuttoned: in both this as well as his love of sentiment and memory he is reminiscent of Auden. In places, this sentimentalism becomes bathetic and trivial (as in the poem ‘Furry’) and the rumpled meter and half rhymes look slovenly, as in the opening poem ‘Lullaby for a Newborn,’ or, regrettably, the poem that gives the book its title; although the story both poems tell, and the scenes they depict, are not uninteresting. That said, Leithauser succeeds often enough.
This is not to say that Leithauser is a metrical novice. He seems especially to love iambic tetrameter – its sing-song sway, its potential for both irony and lightness. His rhyming is inventive, as ‘The Third Suitor’ demonstrates, and he can tell a story. Throughout, he is also at great pains to explore and affirm the ordinary and the day-to-day. Leithauser’s work aside, this mode of poetry, a kind of bourgeois lyricism – suburban, intentionally small poetry – is often read by and produced by conservatives and formalists, probably in reaction to the hangover from the stream of pseudo-romantic, beatnik, hippie, Freudian, psychological, deconstructed, antiracist or Tik-Tok-infused industrial byproduct that many poets have been slinging for the past few decades. This petite romanticism has its place. Its benefit is that, at its best, it is clearly written, normal, and aims to be reflective of the values associated with what Yvor Winters called “the plain style.” That said, one begins to tire of writing and reading it if it is unredeemed by sharp observation, psychological realism, and an appreciation of the real scope that even a normal, small life affords.
Leithauser addresses an issue adjacent to this one in an interview with Ryan Wilson (Literary Matters 9.1). I highly recommend the interview, which will do a better job of introducing Leithauser’s work to new readers than this review. His is an impressive resumé. The quotations below are from that interview, and serve to put this new book of poems in their proper context:
RW: ” . . . These days, I daresay a great many young writers go in fear of nostalgia because it seems irrevocably connected to sentimentality, but your novels, while sometimes steeped in nostalgia’s honeyed glow, don’t come across as sentimental at all. Would you discuss how you think about the relationship between nostalgia and sentimentality?
BL: Sentimentality interests me a good deal. I sometimes feel especially drawn to writers who are often at their best when being sentimental—however unlikely that may sound… In a better universe than ours, the distinction [between writing interesting and likeable characters] wouldn’t exist. To be likable would be to be interesting. It’s one of many ways in which the world of fiction fails to correspond to the world we live in. Kindness, goodness – these things are so welcome in real life, where surliness and suspicion so often rule. But kindness, goodness – these things are often dull on the page. So even without thinking much about it, perhaps, the novelist learns to be wary about depicting virtues of this sort. In addition, among critics there’s that pervasive axiom (again, perhaps insufficiently thought about) which says that kind characters are inevitably sentimental. Hence, the elderly retired nanny in Waugh’s Brideshead, who takes such a loving interest in her former charges, is seen as sentimental. Yet I find her utterly believable. I often wonder about some critics: have they truly never encountered disinterested compassion, clemency, solicitude? I suspect they have, but have also trained their critical judgment to view its depiction as inherently untrue-to-life. I see that we’re back to the subject of sentimentality, a subject of endless interest to me. With many critics (as with many novelists and poets), there’s a self-congratulation about being unsentimental – about being sufficiently hard-boiled and cynical – that strikes me as itself sentimental. I find this is true about two modern poets I absolutely revere – John Berryman and Philip Larkin. There’s a persona to Berryman – the one who keeps saying, effectively, “Here I am looking death in the face, Pal” – that emerges a little too glibly. These things are hard to discuss without oneself sounding self-congratulatory or unsympathetic. But I remember as an undergraduate in Elizabeth Bishop’s class the day she brought in Larkin’s High Windows, and read some of the poems and we discussed them. Now that book strikes me as an absolute masterpiece. I think she thought so too – but she was trying to illuminate some aspect of the book that displeased her or unnerved her. And if I understood her aright, she was saying there was something a little too easy – sentimental – to the book’s darkness. The harder task was to see light within the darkness. Gentle Miss Bishop, it turned out, was taking up in her poems the more difficult task. There’s a good argument to be made, anyway, that her winsome and delicate Geography III, which came out a few years after High Windows, is the less sentimental, the much tougher, of the two books.”[i]
I quote the paragraph because I agree with it in large measure, even as a reader who has revisited Larkin more often than Bishop. I also want to make sure that my comments about Leithauser’s occasional lapses into the sentimental or trivial, as I have put it, are seen in their relation to the author’s values and sense of the world. One can have too little, as well as too much, lightness.
Appropriately, when we move to “Lighter,” the middle section of the work, we see that light verse takes wit to write. Leithauser has this in abundance, and playfulness besides. The best here are ‘Six Quatrains,’ ‘In the English Department Lounge,’ and ‘The Muses.’ ‘Icarus and His Kid Brother’ is inventive, but hard to read aloud properly. ‘Kisses After Novocaine’ is trivial, the subject matter unequal to the pseudo-reflection that attends it; it could have been funny had the innate absurdity of the situation been carried to greater lengths. I quote my two favorites of the ‘Six Quatrains’ in full:
II. ANONYMOUS’S LAMENT
Though love, (it’s been said) is a perilous game,
At times I might wish to be bolder—
Just once to be either the moth or the flame
And not the candle holder.
IV. WHAT TO BELIEVE: A BIBLICAL EXEGESIS
The garden of Eden?
Maybe a fable.
Yet you can be certain
Cain slew Able.
The next section, “At Home” begins the book’s thematic diminuendo. This section of the book seems to me more uneven than its fellows. Its themes are domestic, familial memory and sentiment. ‘Permeable Worlds’ is really a collation of three separate poems that are thematically joined, but it holds together well. It is observational, yet does a good job of making the ordinary strange, highlighting the otherwise unobserved. ‘Some Stranger’s Passport’ is more interesting in its second half than its beginning, and one feels like the windup was not quite worth the pitch, although the plot (involving two doppelgangers whose paths cross) sounds like a short story Leithauser never wrote; if it had to have been a poem, it would have been better to have been a long blank verse poem. ‘Furry’ is odd, disjointed, and bad. ‘A Single Flight’ gives us Leithauser’s five-page version of Wordsworth’s ‘Preludes’ and Betjeman’s ‘Summoned By Bells.’
When we reach the last section (also named “Darker,”like the book’s first part,) we are greeted by eight short poems, mostly about animals, machines, and a man with severe dementia. Since human beings entertain all manner of hopes about their innate worth, ultimate destiny, and what constitutes their happiness, and are also capable of asking the questions about life that animals are not, a poet can make effective use of “the pathetic fallacy” to strip such things away, and leave us with raw suffering, raw joy. ‘The Parrot,’ ‘Happy Hour,’ and ‘Motel’ all do this effectively. ‘Blaze’ is a poem with a solid punchline. ‘The Parrot’ reminds one of Baudelaire’s poems about cats, pipes, and other bits of domestic furniture. It also does a good job of permitting the poet a moment of pessimism while identifying such pessimism with a sort of artificial crankiness – the product of maladjustment to unnatural and demeaning conditions. (Is it a caricature of Philip Larkin?) The book ends, appropriately enough, with the poem ‘Total’, which is so effective that I quote it in full, below:
For now, this once, a blackened noon.
Cold silence drops on everything.
. . . It’s clear the world is ending soon.
And why in their dead reckoning—
Their voices echoed off the moon—
The crickets have begun to sing.
This poem (another exemplary instance of the integrity and clarity possible in epigrams) does an excellent job at pulling together the thematic threads of the book: life and death, music and terror, psychological immediacy and ironic distance, with a dash of humor and humanity. We are dropped into the middle of panic at the omnipresence of death, and then we are required to see things in perspective. Life and happiness (and the crickets) have the last word.
The epigrams and the “light” poems are the most successful, and I do not think this is to damn Leithauser with faint praise. These kinds of poems are often the hardest poems to write, since they require concentration, wit, ruthless editing, and poetic mastery, whereas very little is easier to write than the breezy Wordsworthian memoir-poems that are also a part of this volume. Almost no single poem in this book is a ‘Great Poem,’ but there are many strong poems collected here. (‘Total’ may be the best.) As is so often the case with well-wrought lyric poetry, we end by wishing to know the person who wrote the poems better, because of the intelligence, the humor, and the sympathy for suffering that the poems reveal. On the strength of these poems, I purchased one of the author’s novels and am looking forward to deepening my acquaintance.
[i] My thanks to Ryan Wilson and Literary Matters for their kind permission to use this quotation. See Issue 9:1 – Literary Matters
MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form.