The Old Current is a highly accessible collection of poems by Brad Leithauser. They are varied in tone: often elegiac, sometimes grim, sometimes funny. I confess that while I chuckled at several of the humorous ones, I preferred the more sad or dark poems. One’s mileage of course will vary on that.

The first poem, “Lullabies for a Newborn” is one of the lighter ones, as a father is up late with his “little needling”, his “show-er of lung-power” who has a “simple knack . . . of rendering your circle/dazed and docile/and subservient.” But even as the father thinks back humorously to “that peaceable/Kingdom of fern-/blanketed valleys and/Pillowy hills — an earlier/Other terrain now known/As the Land Before You Were Born”, the poem offers up some darker glimpses. Of how “the dark/is big, and unaccountable” or “Perhaps a scientist/Might tell us when/the newborn brain/First learns to fear.” The poem ends, though, on a lovely note (as many of the poems do): “Let’s go with that — with love/You called. I heard your call.”

Another favorite was “Words Turn Back”, where the speaker addresses a lost friend, noting how “The living move on — there is no other way —/And yet our words turn back,/And often we most meaningfully speak/Over the shoulder.” The poem ends less positively than the former, with “the same recognition/of a reviving uncertainty: our unreckonable/But identical destination.”

The title poem, perhaps my favorite in the collection, also raises the issue of time’s inexorable passage, as the poem revels in our ability to time travel in our minds:
I’m sixty-six, and could anything
Reliably be more heartening
Than stray hints that life’s brightest events
Are, however far flung, strung
Along a long old current
Of some vast, unglimpsed waterway
Where past and present
Dissolve in enduring flux?

The poems I’d say depend more on situation and story than image, though some vivid ones arise now and then, such as the “neon-skinned Ebony depths” of a Tokyo river. Warmly inviting, relatable, accessible as noted, light at times, but often leaving one with a lingering thoughtfulness if not sadness (though that at times), it’s an easy recommendation