The Odd Last Thing She Did - Softcover

Leithauser, Brad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375708499 ISBN 13: 9780375708497

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

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

From the Inside Flap

rad 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.

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?

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375708499
• ISBN 13: 9780375708497
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96