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The Old Current: Poems
MacArthur Grant–winning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in over decade, one which recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age.
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 over 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 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 “Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom./Behind me, five 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 changes. 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?”
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 over 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 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 “Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom./Behind me, five 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 changes. 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?”
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
Published March 4, 2025
About the author
Brad Leithauser
54 books66 followersBRAD 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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 7, 2025
This is a mixed bags of poems. For the most part they are lyrical. They depict episodes, people and places from the author’s life.
May 18, 2025
The Old Current is a highly accessible collection of poems by Brad Leithauser. They are varied in tone: often elegiac, sometimes grim, sometimes funny. I confess that while I chuckled at several of the humorous ones, I preferred the more sad or dark poems. One’s mileage of course will vary on that.
The first poem, “Lullabies for a Newborn” is one of the lighter ones, as a father is up late with his “little needling”, his “show-er of lung-power” who has a “simple knack . . . of rendering your circle/dazed and docile/and subservient.” But even as the father thinks back humorously to “that peaceable/Kingdom of fern-/blanketed valleys and/Pillowy hills — an earlier/Other terrain now known/As the Land Before You Were Born”, the poem offers up some darker glimpses. Of how “the dark/is big, and unaccountable” or “Perhaps a scientist/Might tell us when/the newborn brain/First learns to fear.” The poem ends, though, on a lovely note (as many of the poems do): “Let’s go with that — with love/You called. I heard your call.”
Another favorite was “Words Turn Back”, where the speaker addresses a lost friend, noting how “The living move on — there is no other way —/And yet our words turn back,/And often we most meaningfully speak/Over the shoulder.” The poem ends less positively than the former, with “the same recognition/of a reviving uncertainty: our unreckonable/But identical destination.”
The title poem, perhaps my favorite in the collection, also raises the issue of time’s inexorable passage, as the poem revels in our ability to time travel in our minds:
I’m sixty-six, 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
Of some vast, unglimpsed waterway
Where past and present
Dissolve in enduring flux?
The poems I’d say depend more on situation and story than image, though some vivid ones arise now and then, such as the “neon-skinned Ebony depths” of a Tokyo river. Warmly inviting, relatable, accessible as noted, light at times, but often leaving one with a lingering thoughtfulness if not sadness (though that at times), it’s an easy recommendation
The first poem, “Lullabies for a Newborn” is one of the lighter ones, as a father is up late with his “little needling”, his “show-er of lung-power” who has a “simple knack . . . of rendering your circle/dazed and docile/and subservient.” But even as the father thinks back humorously to “that peaceable/Kingdom of fern-/blanketed valleys and/Pillowy hills — an earlier/Other terrain now known/As the Land Before You Were Born”, the poem offers up some darker glimpses. Of how “the dark/is big, and unaccountable” or “Perhaps a scientist/Might tell us when/the newborn brain/First learns to fear.” The poem ends, though, on a lovely note (as many of the poems do): “Let’s go with that — with love/You called. I heard your call.”
Another favorite was “Words Turn Back”, where the speaker addresses a lost friend, noting how “The living move on — there is no other way —/And yet our words turn back,/And often we most meaningfully speak/Over the shoulder.” The poem ends less positively than the former, with “the same recognition/of a reviving uncertainty: our unreckonable/But identical destination.”
The title poem, perhaps my favorite in the collection, also raises the issue of time’s inexorable passage, as the poem revels in our ability to time travel in our minds:
I’m sixty-six, 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
Of some vast, unglimpsed waterway
Where past and present
Dissolve in enduring flux?
The poems I’d say depend more on situation and story than image, though some vivid ones arise now and then, such as the “neon-skinned Ebony depths” of a Tokyo river. Warmly inviting, relatable, accessible as noted, light at times, but often leaving one with a lingering thoughtfulness if not sadness (though that at times), it’s an easy recommendation
October 16, 2025
I enjoyed several offerings in this collection. I'm finding the need to reread and reflect necessary to parse meaning. I guess that is the gift of poetry,to slow one down and be thoughtful.some of my favorites in this book are Lullabies for a Newborn,End of an Adventurer,The Third Suitor. Other poems were interesting but left me feeling a wisp of sadness.
August 6, 2025
Enjoyable read but leaves you with the same feeling you get after finishing a book by Aimee nezhukumatathil- where you’re like really? These are our most brilliant poet professors?
…well shoot lemme try if it’s that basic
…well shoot lemme try if it’s that basic
March 14, 2026
not in your heart,
that unreliable
narrator, but
to an earth apart:
one devoted to creation
as the volcano,
to revision
as the ocean.
that unreliable
narrator, but
to an earth apart:
one devoted to creation
as the volcano,
to revision
as the ocean.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews