The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems

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 Khayyam ( 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.