Varieties of Inheritance: Leithauser, Kirsch, Sinclair, Allen, Sanders

Emily Leithauser's poems forgo histrionics. With their careful, muted tones and measured progress toward quiet conclusions, they might seem too modest were it not for the soft-spoken brutality underlying some of them. In "Undertow," a speaker responsible for a younger swimmer considers options:

I tell you that I'll steer us through,but something pulls and I release

your palm from mine, letting the currentcomb and choke your little ribs

for half a second. Then I decideto tug you up and lead us home.

Granted, it's half a second, but it's the half a second most of us would prefer to forget. The preponderance of monosyllables and the tetrameter lend a certain childish, nursery-rhyme quality to these lines, but the verb "decide" is all grown up and frighteningly precise. It makes what might have been an anecdote about a startling day at the beach a moral assertion: to decide is to admit the possibility of having decided something else, something much darker than the language of the poem would otherwise suggest.

The title of Leithauser's debut collection makes clear her themes: The Borrowed World acknowledges the world as an inheritance (that it is borrowed means that it has belonged, and perhaps still belongs, to someone else), and a contingent one (that it is borrowed means eventually we will have to give it back). The question of borrowing must be especially urgent for a writer who has two writers for parents, a fact Leithauser does not shy from in her acknowledgments. Faced with such predecessors, a poet has two options: to pretend as though she has sprung fully formed from some Greek egg or to accept her indebtedness and brave forward. Wisely, Leithauser chooses the latter, and her poems—though at times perhaps tonally or formally reminiscent of the work of Brad Leithauser or Mary Jo Salter (and how could they not be?)—achieve their own successes on their own terms.

The poems are richest in their wisdom about relationships, and if it seems as though the bulk of the book concerns familial grief or gratitude and a certain romantic restlessness, I see no problem: most of our lives are concerned with these very things. Leithauser can be unsparing: looking through photographs in "Haiku for a Divorce," she sees her parents in Tokyo, "such tourists / in marriage," and one senses in that phrase both her recognition of their newlywed naïveté and her rage at dissolution. In "Jacket," she considers the implications of the look—in more than one sense—of her mother in a dust jacket photo.

… My mother                has duly mastered

self-willed words                without a fuss.

Unshelved, she's              a vision on

a book I browse                and almost buy.

The phrase "almost buy" surely pertains not only to the book, but also to the vision. Elsewhere, she remembers an unidentified "you / telling me a riddle" and imagines

… we'd had a childwho waits to hear the answer,who finds a good excusenot to play close to meuntil I'm of some use.

Those final lines are both canny and un-, making of the paradigm of innocence—a playing child—a study in pragmatism.

Formally speaking, there are few surprises here—although "My Mother's Riddle" rhymes anagrammatically to dazzling effect ("amend" and "named" is the big payoff)—but Leithauser's poems do not aim for the surprise of novelty; they aim for the surprise of perfection. When she finishes a poem by rhyming cemetery and hard to carry, one thinks, "Exactly so." When she writes, "These past three days I've missed you comically," one thinks, "Comically? Of course!" If I wished on occasion that Leithauser would let a poem off its leash, I came back to the final lines of "Instinct," a poem in which the speaker prepares herself to crush the skull of a suffering animal but can't find the animal after arming herself with a rock:

I place the rock back in my purse.                It's for the best—                this instinct teased,                and put to rest...