BRAD LEITHAUSER is a widely acclaimed poet and novelist and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is his seventeenth book. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore and Amherst.
A Brad Leithauser poem, even a short poem, is usually a narrative. As poems they're strictly fashioned and formal and in that way lend themselves to narratives. And in that way, I think, they seem mechanical and clunk along with little emotion or animation. Still, this reading, I found some things to like, particularly in 2 poems I think display elegance, one a poem about sunlight, the other about Malcolm Lowry.