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Overview
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.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307959669 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author of five collections of poetry, six novels, a novel in verse, two collections of light verse, and a book of essays. Among the many awards and honors he has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He served for a year as Time magazine’s theater critic. In 2005, Leithauser was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland for his writings about Nordic literature. He is a professor in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
OLD GLOBE
For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say
a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—eighty years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear
both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray
and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.
*
Her eye fell at random. “Formosa,” she read.
“Now that’s pretty. Is it there today?”
A pause. “It is,” my brother said,
“though now it’s called Taiwan.”
She looked apologetic. “I sometimes forget . . .”
“Like Sri Lanka,” I added. “Which was Ceylon.”
And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last eighty years? Burma, Baluchistan,
Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay . . .
*
She was in a middle place—
her forties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.
Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,
and overhead a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,
the gift received today—
the globe she’d so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.
*
Finally, there’s cake: eight candles in a ring.
. . . Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing
to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, “Now make a wish before
you blow them out.” She says, “I don’t see—”
stops. Then mildly protests: “But they look so nice.”
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.
Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?
THE BIRTH OF INJUSTICE
Meandering Neandertals
keep bumping up against
the glacier’s high, invasive walls,
whose blackened snout
comes down to eat the ground underneath their feet.
Which is the way now?
What else but hunched despair’s
narrowing valleys, this gathering
feeling of everything
constricting?
It’s an old notion, nearly sensed
from way back when: somehow,
this exorbitant venture of theirs
—Life—isn’t working out.
She’s a brooder, this one,
on her rock, who once or twice, or thrice
(no words for numbers yet),
has laid a child to earth. They take
the tiny body from your arms and it goes
down into a cold mouth we make
ourselves, digging out the shape.
The ice
eats, the earth eats, and having set
her haunches on a rock, she ponders the light:
it’s dawn, or dusk, no language for
origins or ends, and yet the sun
is moving, and in her blood she knows
always their dwindling journey has been far
too brutal: something’s not right.
This big-boned figure who
subsists chiefly on cattails she praises
from the numb gray sand
of a half-frozen pond
prefers of course
the soft and steamy organs of horse
or aurochs, when those are in hand—
not often enough.
Not often enough, days
warmly warm, all the way through,
when the wished sun rises
up in your chest with the blaze
of honey on the tongue, for you the ache
and sting of it, sweet beyond
any sounds a mouth might make.
REMOTE MIDNIGHT
Icelandic Mouse
As, safe in its hole,
The field mouse quakes when the hawk
Soars across the sky,
So the candle, indoors, shakes
When the wind goes howling by.
Kenyan Lion
. . . The leaves, too, quiver
At the roar of a creature
Whose gullet’s vaster
Than that lair where the battered
Blood-streaming sun’s retreated.
Table of Contents
Author's Note xiii
New Poems
I Inward Island
Old Globe 5
Small Building 7
Undergone 11
Moon Over 13
The Other Side 14
Bad Breaks 15
A Vase 20
II Variable Weather
Sleeping Through a Blizzard 25
Sleeping by the Shore 26
Remote Midnights 27
Distant Dawns 28
III Personal Prehistory
The Birth of Injustice 31
Earlier 33
An All but Empty Set 35
Long Odds 38
The Horse in the Gallery 42
Little Dig 46
Altamira 50
From Hundreds of Fireflies
Duckweed 57
An Expanded Want Ad 59
Miniature 62
Between Leaps 63
II Astronomical Riddles 65
Two Summer Jobs 68
Birches 77
Along Lake Michigan 79
Old Hat 82
The Ghost of a Ghost 83
Angel 86
From Cats of the Temple
Two Suspensions Against a Blacktop Backdrop 89
The Buried Graves 91
An Actor Plays a Trumpet 92
Rabbits: A Valentine 95
In a Bonsai Nursery 97
A Stuffed Tortoise 98
Post-Coitum Tristesse: A Sonnet 99
A Noisy Sleeper 100
Floating Light in Tokyo 104
At Greg's 106
In Minako Wada's House no In a Japanese Moss Garden 112
A Flight from Osaka 116
Seaside Greetings 118
On a Seaside Mountain 122
From The Mail from Anywhere
The Mail from Anywhere 127
Signalled 129
Glacier 132
A Candle 133
Reykjavik Winter Couplets 136
Through Two Windows 138
A Bowl of Chinese Fireworks 139
Plexal 141
A Night Dive 143
A Worded Welcome 146
The Crush 148
Your Natural History 150
First Birthday 151
Uncle Grant 152
The Caller 156
Old Bachelor Brother 161
From The Odd Last Thing She Did
A Honeymoon Conception (1952) 165
Set in Stone 167
Very 168
1944: Purple Heart 176
Death of the Family Archivist 178
From R.E.M. 180
The Odd Last Thing She Did 181
At an Island Farm 185
Later 186
Red Leather Jacket 187
Plus the Fact of You 189
Small Waterfall: A Birthday Poem 191
A False Spring 193
Yet Not Yet 194
After the Detonation of the Moon 195
Play 196
An Old Hunter 199
Blessing for Malcolm Lowry 202
Shiloh, 1993 203
Crest and Carpet 204
From Curves and Angles
City Album: A Wet Afternoon 207
Little School in a Jungle 209
Not Lunar Exactly 211
Midsummer, Midwest 212
Son 213
Lorenz 214
A Good List 215
A Teenage Couple 217
Bread and Cheese 218
The Waterclock and the Hourglass 220
A Science-Fiction Writer of the Fifties 221
The Arachnid's Triumph: A One-Act 229
Emigrant's Story 230
An Old Stump 231
Some Ways Along 232
64° North 233
A Further Foray 234