The Old Current
Poems
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
The Old Current
Narrated by:
Brad Leithauser
Buy Now for $9.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Brad Leithauser
-
By:
-
Brad Leithauser
About this listen
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 more than 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 chances. 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?”
Critic Reviews
"A poised, witty, incisive, and enlivening volume." —Booklist
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.