Swoop

Always clever, fun and alert to the history of its flexible forms, this debut at its best is a lot more than fun: it’s a frantic argument in favor of obvious beauty, of ornament, and of elaborate jokes, as barriers against something like despair. The Maryland-based Leithauser offers couplets, quatrains, refrains, puns aplenty, even triolets, along with various rich sorts of word play, enjoying the “scald// of words as they fall, their vein-purr, myrrh-stain.” Her poems also brim with palindromes (“Niagara, o roar again!”) and reversible terms (from the title, “dooms” upside-down). Spinning morals from puns, conclusions from quick conceits, she can come close—perhaps too close—to Kay Ryan, especially when she uses Ryan’s short lines. Elsewhere, though, the undertone of disappointed romance and the quest for complex patterns, even when life’s disappointments are simple indeed, make Leithauser (who works for the Department of Energy in D.C.) a poet of her own, whether writing of hermits (“The arrogant inmate/ alone in his flesh”) or spinning out a set of 11-line poems whose titles start with “Sex” (“Sex Circumspect,” “Sex Rubenesque”). “Inspiration,” she writes, is a “flim flam grand slam,” but the impulse to poetry survives in less primal fashion: “O, she says, because she loves to say O.” Unsympathetic perusers may find the work thin, but more careful readers—especially those who also like much older verse—ought to find it attractive, both for its puzzles and for the lives it contains. (Oct.)