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The Borrowed World

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Emily Leithauser

July 2016

Daniel Klawitter

The title of Emily Leithauser’s debut poetry collection, The Borrowed World, hints at the theme of impermanence that runs throughout the book. Whether it is the fleeting nature of childhood in the poem “Chest of Dolls” or the dissolution of a marriage in “Haiku for a Divorce,” Leithhauser gestures toward the price we pay as finite beings living in a world that is on loan to us. What is borrowed must eventually be returned. There is sadness in this, but sweetness and nostalgia too, for such fleeting moments of experience can be treasured precisely because they cannot be repeated.

The title of Emily Leithauser’s debut poetry collection, The Borrowed World, hints at the theme of impermanence that runs throughout the book. Whether it is the fleeting nature of childhood in the poem “Chest of Dolls” or the dissolution of a marriage in “Haiku for a Divorce,” Leithhauser gestures toward the price we pay as finite beings living in a world that is on loan to us. What is borrowed must eventually be returned. There is sadness in this, but sweetness and nostalgia too, for such fleeting moments of experience can be treasured precisely because they cannot be repeated. And sometimes, by letting go of our expectations of permanence, there can be great freedom—as in the poem “And, Again, Walking with You,” where time is fully present in the “now” because no future is longed for:

And we know we will never marry,
never turn from each other;

no accidents of lust or listlessness
will occur, and we can always live

on the edge of something we cannot ruin,
and what a tease that is, what a privilege:

I am yours because I am never yours,
and you are mine because you cannot wander—

or not wander—and the body and its vagaries
are incidents and not the story.

However, the other side of the story is that some expectations and desires are harder to let go of, as in the poem “The Cut” where the poet declares: “if healing is a gradual disappearance, / then I don’t want to heal from you.” Leithauser is not afraid of these kinds of direct self-revelations, but she is also not a “confessional” or diary poet. All the poems in A Borrowed World are written with a keen formalist eye to syntax, meter and rhyme, which creates a pattern of order and appropriate distance from the raw nature of the experiences themselves.

The most effective poem in the book for me is, in fact, a modified sonnet with a strong philosophical bent entitled “The Leopard” (a poem described as “idiosyncratically structured” by Michael Palma in the book’s forward) and written, we are told by the author, “after Borges.” (Though it just as easily could be written after Rilke’s famous poem “The Panther”):

At dawn, the leopard watches the firmament
dissolve in sunlight through his cage’s bars;
he’s fresh from dreams of tearing flesh, the scent
of deer still on his paws. A carnivore’s
nightmare: instead of reddened fields, a cell’s
dull iron; of opened rib cages, walls.

At the very end of the poem we are informed that: “No words will quite coerce/these bars to bend, or move the universe.” But Leithhauser does manage to bend (or at least gently nudge) the limits of language in this collection to the point that our common cages of mortality and memory and loss become a little more bearable and aesthetically pleasing. It isn’t a surprise that this book won the 2015 Able Muse Book Award: the poems are sure-footed in terms of technique and move gracefully to a variety of rhythms and forms. Leithauser’s muse is “able” indeed.

Most of the poems in this collection are actually rather understated in terms of diction. Leithauser is no show-off, she doesn’t set off a whole bunch of linguistic fireworks; her style and tone is more inclined towards slow and steady accumulation. But that is no sin and can even be a virtue. Other poets can certainly learn from such patience and attention to craft. And in the end, I believe most readers who read this book will be grateful for having been taught “that suspense: / art that waits for you.”

 

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