Mail From Anywhere, The : Poems

Rating:
Summary: Everywhere and Nowhere
Review: He is a poet the same way Somerset Maugham is a thinker; the poems are set in dozens of exotic locales and glitter like fireflies against the night of the page. As the title suggests, one exotic locale is pretty much the same as any other for Brad Leithauser, as long as you get mail from it. The messages that come through tell little stories, almost as though they weren't big enough to be used as the raw material for his novels. Four pythons sit in pretzel-like knots on the floor, daring the viewer to make sense of whose body belongs to who. Leithauser's verse line is sinuous, like one of those pythons, and looks beautiful glittering in the night, its dumb eyes staring forward without a thought in its head. In Iceland he goes for a brisk walk and encounters a "grim-/ eyed, wide-shouldered, skewbald ram" with whom he locks glances. It's a book of many encounters, and in most of them Brad wins out, largely because he is so good at writing he makes the other party seem ridiculous or learns a lesson from the encounter which he tries to parlay, like Aesop, into a poem. In the case of the Icelandic ram, we learn that "no place is out-of-the-way to the creature/ grounding its livelihood there." It's a sentiment worthy of the ecological poets like Gary Snyder, but he'd be more oblique about it. They say that Leithauser was one of the favorite poets of the late James Merrill. By the way, he's great to look at too.