"The Work of Four Poets," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1982 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), March 14, 1982, pp. 12, 16-17.∗

Brad Leithauser's Hundreds of Fireflies brims with simple, sensuous poems that are, in a sense, eclogues and elegies…. [The] pastoral poet, a Virgil or Frost, typically gathers metaphors from the countryside to take with him back to the city. Thus Leithauser, perhaps alluding to Frost, writes a poem called "Birches" and another about a Michigan ghost town where, "Had I not been told / Where to pick out the vined / Roots of settlement, I might / Have seen no trace at all," calling up Frost's "Directive." Yet none of his master's wayward ambiguities or gnarled syntactical routing make their way into Leithauser. His poems rush like water down hill, luculently fresh, as in "Dead Elms by a River."…

Some of [Leithauser's] poems read like exercises in descriptive poetry and have less imaginative pressure than one expects in serious work, but unevenness of this sort often plagues first books. The good news is that Leithauser has a clear eye—an unclouded vision of the world…. He ruthlessly avoids the showy surrealism and unnatural (and unconvincing) metaphors that have given much of contemporary poetry a bad name. Still better, he has respect for what is called "craft"—the workmanship that saying things plainly requires of even the most exalted genius. I venture that Brad Leithauser will find poems closer to himself, and truer, as he grows. Meanwhile, Hundreds of Fireflies makes good reading. (p. 38)

Jay Parini, "A New Generation of Poets," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1982 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 186, No. 15, April 14, 1982, pp. 37-9.∗

Brad Leithauser seems to be at home anyplace. For several years I have been following his poetry with delight whenever it appears in magazines. His first book, Hundreds of Fireflies …, confirms my sense of pleasure. Among the often strident clamor of youthful poetic voices, Leithauser's stands out for its rare combination of exaltation and skillful control. Usually, he concentrates on small subjects, miniature perceptions….

Leithauser's ideas are effervescent with optimism. The most somber spectacle can still provoke his hopeful imagination to a vision of rebirth. A dead deer on the beach "Along Lake Michigan," for example, merely fills the poet and his companion with disbelief—death simply cannot exist in this place…. For Leithauser …, as for Shelley, death itself is a dream from which we awaken into the white radiance of eternity.

Perhaps the most impressive and developed part of Hundreds of Fireflies is a section entitled "Two Summer Jobs." These sustained narratives depict the unfolding portrait of the artist as a budding poet…. "Law Clerk, 1979" (Leithauser is now a lawyer) traces the subtle development of a mature poetic sensibility. The young man works his way through writer's block by staying late at the office, and while there, attempting parodies of famous poems—an interesting peek at how he acquired his easy grace with forms. A scene of the conventionally dressed law clerk encountering a bluejeaned former classmate from Harvard, also an aspiring poet, now rusticated to the country to make pots, is a sly parody of the usual clichés about nonconformist poets. As Leithauser becomes increasingly comfortable with the legal world, "the whole courtly game / of claim and counterclaim," he discovers as well the actual nature of his poetic gifts. Looking out at a Manhattan illumined by the dying light, Leithauser feels that it "seems to say we come / through drudgery to glory." Here as elsewhere in Hundreds of Fireflies, many disparate worlds are reconciled. This is an exciting debut from an ambitious and brilliant poet. (p. 15)

Phoebe Pettingell, "Reconciling Disparate Worlds," in The New Leader (© 1982 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc.), Vol. LXV, No. 9, May 3, 1982, pp. 14-15.∗

[Hundreds of Fireflies] is an overtly formal book…. It is marked by extreme control, personal reticence, and a calm, confident virtuosity that makes us think of Elizabeth Bishop or [Richard Wilbur]. And more remarkable than the style is the subject matter. Leithauser writes almost exclusively about the natural world—not the implacable Nature of Jeffers or Frost, but the benign, pastoral, optically infinite nature of the Dutch landscape painters. His poems are so detailed and unemphatically lucid that we cannot help but wonder where and how the poet weathered the experiences of the past decade….

We have been schooled to approach poetry in a certain way, taught to extract content, a message, and then to summarize and report. Leithauser's poems resist these tactics. His lines embody the perceptual experience, are that experience; they hug their content and will not give it up. The poems are not about anything. Their meaning consists of the progress of the eye across the texture of the page, the movement through beautifully patterned clauses. The formal underpinning is clearly not gratuitous. It is there because attentiveness of such high degree discloses order. Yielding to the exigencies of form we become tensed and alert. The eye slows down, starts to move on tiptoe. And when we come to the end of the poem there is closure, the obscure, half-unconscious appeasement of our appetite for balance and clarity. The qualities of the poem become—briefly—our qualities….

Leithauser's work is proof that the heritage of formal verse is more arsenal than obstacle, that the problem, where there is a problem, lies not in the rigidity of the forms but in the rigidity of their user. Here is a clear case of a supple and subtle intellect deriving maximum benefit from its interaction with formal strictures. The maturity of these poems is to some extent derived from the maturity of poetic form itself. And as for the criterion of relevance—any doubts we may have vanish as we begin to read….

Hundreds of Fireflies is not without its weaknesses. At times the reader will long for greater variety of subject matter or a less imperturbable tone. Also, it might be argued that the poet falls victim to his own skill in places—his knack for pure resolutions sometimes limits his access to less predictable side-roads. In the same way, there could be more burr, more rasp, more protrusion of recalcitrant fiber: in other words, less smooth precision. But this is quibbling before a stunning maiden voyage. We would do better to break a champagne bottle belatedly against the hull, to praise the courage and obstinacy required to stand so far apart from gangs and trends. Here is a man with a love of the world and its words and the exceedingly rare capacity to express the first by means of the second.

Sven Birkerts, in a review of "Hundreds of Fireflies," in New Boston Review (copyright 1982 by Boston Critic, Inc.), Vol. VII, No. 3, June, 1982, p. 29.

[Brad Leithauser] has learned from Marianne Moore a form of compressed emblem description, from Elizabeth Bishop an unassuming visual scanning, from Robert Frost a love of rural scenes, from A. R. Ammons a telling use of modesty of voice, and from James Merrill a worldly form of narrative verse. [In Hundreds of Fireflies these] lessons have been assimilated beyond pastiche, on the whole, and have been brought into a tone distinguished by its mildness. Mildness is in fact Leithauser's chief personal form of stylization. Mild poets are rare. There is a welcome lightness and sweetness in Leithauser recommending him to readers whose tastes bring them to Herbert and Schubert. And (another form of stylization) he likes, like Herbert, the compression of the proverb or the riddle…. [The eleven "Astronomical Riddles" in this volume, for example, bring] the unwieldy planets into the surprising stylization of brief self-description…. (pp. 41-2)

Leithauser's quick sympathy, his humor, and his love of an elusive playfulness appear in these trifles. He is not unaware of what such orderly compressions of phenomena leave out in their will-to-stylization: another of his short poems ["The Integers"], muses on the neatness of the procession of the integers vis-à-vis negative and irrational numbers and nonrepeating decimals…. A mind wishing to write such "Minims" (as Leithauser calls them) is of course in danger of forgetting the swamp in its passion for "neatness of finish! neatness of finish!" (Marianne Moore). However attractive the self-effacing quality of such polish may be in this era of lugubrious self-exposure in verse, it cannot be the only ingredient a poet has to offer. Leithauser branches out in two directions when he forsakes his jeux d'esprit.

One (in "Two Summer Jobs") is a believable form of stylized autobiography (borrowed from James Merrill)…. Though expertly enough done, these poems are finally poems finding no stylization beyond what is offered by Merrill—his airy glitter, his penchant for puns, his jewelled effects, his tinge of evening nostalgia, his dying fall after a sparkling trajectory, his light ironies. Leithauser's other venture is far more his own—a series of poems on animals or natural scenes, poems formed in stanzas with a pattern of delicate and unemphatic rhyme. These poems have titles like "Giant Tortoise" or "Daybreak" or "Dead Elms by a River" or "Birches." Their chief form of stylization is the framing of a scene stripped to essential detail and seen in a moment of insight….

In ["Birches"] Leithauser is writing in syllabics, but his sevensyllable line breathes with the life of the English trimeter and tetrameter and the French octosyllabic line of the lais, even allowing itself from time to time (as "in the overhanging leafage," the last line of the poem) to subside into that pleasant eight-syllable cadence. This meditation on birches expresses gratitude for the lightening of forest darkness offered by a stand of birches; they bring clouds into the forest, they are the feminine to the forest's masculine, they siphon down the sun's light, they are "becomingly multiform," and they suggest a mild prehistoric beatitude.

The poem hints rather than declares; but we do know, by the end, that the slender birches, though not entirely gentle (they can evoke lightning on stormy days) are nonetheless a youthful presence relieving the forest's immobility and gloom. Leithauser's concentration of attention makes the birches pliant to his imaginative will; it is he that sees their bark as "tattered but immaculate bandages." This is the stylization of anthropomorphism; but the birches are no sooner thus made human than they are made saurian in Leithauser's flexible handling of their appearance.

The mystery Leithauser sees in appearances is of course a reflection of his suggestible mind, which turns things over in attraction and fear. Each of his poems repays rereading; most have a shapeliness of evolution that pleases all by itself; and on many pages the reader is struck by the writer's interest in playing with scale, a resource frequently ignored by poets. (p. 42)

Helen Vendler, "The Creeping Griffon," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1982 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. XXIX, No. 14, September 23, 1982, pp. 41-4.∗

Leithauser seems … the sort of poet who collects and assimilates, giving each inconspicuous detail its due without inflating it, piling up exact observations with a freshness and prodigality like nature's own. He is one who, in Yeats's phrase, has attained "right mastery of natural things." One is reminded of earlier inspired accumulators: of Moore, of Bishop, perhaps most of Wilbur. In these poets description can become almost microscopic; [in Hundreds of Fireflies] Leithauser emulates and even may outdo them at this…. (pp. 179-80)

The poet sees the lustrous surface of things but also penetrates it…. The awareness of a submerged darkness—[in "Duckweed"], and in "The Return to a Cabin," "The Ghost of a Ghost," and others—lends a needed gravity to Leithauser's writing. But it is not usually what he chooses to dwell upon. He is like Wilbur particularly in this, I think: the vision of the world remains, against odds scrupulously taken into account, an affirmative one. More than affirmative—celebratory. The poems communicate delight as much through their alertness of style as through their keenness of perception. There must be very few poets as young as Leithauser in such absolute command of their instrument. In particular his handling of rhyme, sometimes in extremely intricate patterns, is remarkable in avoiding distortion of diction or syntax.

It is difficult to single out titles for specific notice in a collection of such consistent quality. Except for a few dispensable epigrams, all of the poems aspire to and many of them attain true distinction. I should mention "An Expanded Want Ad," for its enticingly casual but faintly haunted scene-setting, "Canoeing at Night" and "Along Lake Michigan," for their calm and ample rendering of experience. At the center of the book is a pair of poems, "Two Summer Jobs" which successfully strike quite a different note from the rest of the book. These are poised, rueful, autobiographical vignettes: amusing and touching memories of working as a tennis instructor and, eight years later, as a law clerk, Leithauser is normally so careful not to obtrude his personality in an obvious sense that it is surprising, and somehow liberating, to see him here commanding center stage. Too elaborate in design to summarize, these two poems have a lot to say not only about Leithauser himself, but about coming of age in the Seventies. There is in them a personal warmth and charm that is a match for the poet's considerable technical skill. Like any good book of poems, Hundreds of Fireflies is capable of arousing in readers any number of responses. I would like to note in closing one immediate effect of the book upon me, because it is one that few books have lately offered. Reading it made me happy. (pp. 180-81)

Robert B. Shaw, "Fireflies and Other Animals," in Poetry (© 1982 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), Vol. CXLI, No. 3, December, 1982, pp. 170-81.∗