From one of our most universally admired poets: a generous selection from his five acclaimed books of poetry, and an outstanding group of new poems. From the outset, Brad Leithauser has displayed a venturesome taste for quirky patterns, innovative designs sprung loose from traditional forms. In The Oldest Word for Dawn, we encounter a sonnet in one-syllable lines (';Post-Coitum Tristesse'), a clanging rhyme-mad tribute to the music of Tin Pan Alley (';A Good List'), intricate buried rhyme schemes (';In Minako Wada's House'), autobiography spun through parodies of Frost and Keats and Omar Khayym (';Two Summer Jobs'). In a new poem, ';Earlier,' the poet investigates a kind of paradox: What is the oldest word for dawn in any language? The pursuit ultimately descends into the roots of speech, the genesis of art. ';Earlier' is part of a sequence devoted to prehistoric themes: the cave paintings of Altamira, the disappearance of the Neanderthals, the poet's journey with his teenage daughter to excavate a triceratops skeleton in Montana . . . The author of six novels as well, Leithauser not surprisingly brings to his verse a flair for compelling narrative: a fateful romantic encounter on a streetcar (';1944: Purple Heart'); the mesmerizing arrival of television in a quiet Detroit neighborhood (';Not Lunar Exactly'); two boys heedlessly, joyfully bidding permanent farewell to a beloved sister (';Emigrant's Story'). The Oldest Word for Dawn reveals Brad Leithauser as a poet of surpassing tenderness and exactitude, a poet whose work, at sixty, fulfills the promise noted by James Merrill on the publication of his first book: ';The observations glisten, the feelings ring true. These poems by a young, unostentatious craftsman are made to something very like perfection. No one should overlook them.'