Love's paper wings

Here's a tough sell: a 300-page poem. And it's about lepidoptera. I suspect most readers would rather be stuck on the end of a pin – but wait. This novel in verse by Brad Leithauser catches the eye with all the charm and complexity of an Ozark Swallowtail.

"Darlington's Fall" tells the quiet story of a wealthy butterfly scientist at the turn of the century. If that's not alluring enough, it's told in 600 ten-line sonnets. Fortunately, Leithauser knows what he's up against: "It's long, I know, for a poem," he admits. "But it's short for a novel." That may sound like special pleading, but this is a journey as unlikely and remarkable as the annual 2,200-mile migration of monarchs.

The story opens with 7-year-old Russ Darlington catching a frog – "the jewel of the world: conceived / In mud and muck" – in the woods around Storey, Indiana. With his typical measure of bittersweet wit, the narrator notes that "there are some / Encounters that configure your soul." He's a strange little boy, "Little Mister Naturalist" they call him. "There's a suspicion / That the boy's a little odd," but allowances are made for a child who's lost his mother – and remains the only heir to the wealthiest man in the county. Besides, "he gives every sign ... Of being that thing so alarming whenever it / Appears in a slip of a child: a born professor."

In fact, exploring in the woodland swamp teaches him more than a university ever could. When he spots "a miracle on the wing," a Urania marina thousands of miles from its home in Mexico, his destiny is set. Mounting it carefully, he already knows "there's a fine pressure to be found / Between the maiming and the maintaining; / It's a matter, as much as anything, of trust." Striking that balance in his own life, of course, proves more difficult.

True to his destiny and with his anxious but indulgent father supporting him all the way, Russ begins weekend visits to the university at 13 to pursue his love of creepy crawling things. He attracts the attention of Dr. Schrock, a ghastly looking Austrian professor who encourages Russ's intellectual interests to the exclusion of all else.

By the time he enrolls, he's practically a professor himself. But his intellectual and emotional development is still in the larva stage. He has no patience with novels – "Honestly why in the world look there?" – or poetry, "which likewise failed to progress." No, at the turn of the century, with the new field of genetics generating a rush of discovery, Russ couldn't be more thrilled: "Oh, what great / Good fortune," he thinks, "to be a 'bug man' in this age!"

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