What’s in a Name? Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett; Besiege Me by Nicholas Wong; Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner

Jonathan Russell Clark
| Reviews

 

The poems in Mark Leidner’s collection Returning the Sword to the Stone blend the sensibilities of the poems of the previous two writers. He references many real-world things, but he does so in a way that isn’t as specifically autobiographical as Wong’s. He remains in a similar realm of philosophical distance as Bennett. His love poem, “Being With You,” for example, is a series of similes, e.g.: “It’s like becoming extremely happy / because you’ve found buried treasure on the beach / even though you were already happy / just from being on the beach.” These comparisons are hyper-specific about the feeling being described, but they stay away from relating anything from Leidner’s life.
Leidner uses repetition, wit, and a kind of absurdism in his poetry. The poem “Spoonerisms” (named after the Oxford professor William Archibald Spoone, which refers to verbal gaffes in which letters in a phrase are switched around, as in, saying “wottles of bater” instead of “bottles of water”) is a series of phrases followed by a Spoonerism version, which form new, accidentally meaningful phrases: “let’s dance / debt’s lance” or “various cultures / carry us vultures.” The title poem, like “Being With You,” is a list of similes, each describing an uncanny (and mostly absurd) scenario: “It’s like a Revolutionary War-era reboot of Jurassic Park featuring velociraptors in full British redcoat regalia.” Jurassic Park actually appears again in this collection, in the poem “Opening Day,” which goes like this, in its entirety:

 

If they ever really did clone dinosaurs

and built a real Jurassic Park

it would be funny if a tiny, little

asteroid arrived

and destroyed only it.

 

“Opening Day,” like a lot of Leidner’s verses, has the wit of a really effective tweet, which is not meant pejoratively. His poems are accessible, entertaining, and actually funny. My favorite poem, “Youth is a Fugitive,” opens with a continuation of the title, “that thinks it’s a hostage.” This is incredibly precise wit of the Dorothy Parker level. Another line in the same poem: “A child surprised that a neon sign / isn’t hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one’s goals.” This is so painfully accurate and wonderfully humorous. Leidner’s brand of writing can take the tone of a charming carnival barker wending his way through beautiful and important, if idiosyncratic, forms.

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom and the forthcoming Skateboard. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the L.A. Times, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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