No, not sonnets… by Dennis Leckey, Poetry Monthly Press and Graphics, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY, 28pp, £4
In this collection, Dennis Leckey has gathered a variety of poems which take you through the gamut of human experience - humour, irony, pathos, longing. And, yes, some of them are sonnets. He draws on a wide range of influences and always acknowledges his exemplars - Armitage, Holub, Jennings, George Eliot and many more. Some are pastiche, such as "When" (inspired by Jenny Joseph) which is a re-orientation and personalisation of the well-known "Warning", but none the less effective for its opening expression "When I am free again…" Compared with the original, what Dennis Leckey's poem lacks in the sense of suppressed rebellion and outrageous humour, which is fundamental to Joseph's poem, is compensated by the awareness of the writer's situation and longing for the future.
And there is no getting away from the sense that these poems are written from inside prison, acknowledging childhood and family, but looking out, and forward. Vernacular expressions such as "association" (no. 24), "bang-up" (no. 27) and "Lock-down" (no. 32) punctuate extracts from the "No, not sonnets…" sequences, and it is perhaps no coincidence that these references are most direct in these more regimented and structured 14 line verse forms, described in the blurb as liberated sonnets.
Some of the brightest moments for me in this collection are provided by the humour in the short poems. Music Was is a poem which is short and almost perfectly formed, with the last sentence, by using the present tense, giving the lie to the title. It is, still, all right! This skill with ambiguity, the near pun, and use of words which invoke the possibility of secondary meanings, give many of the poems an unexpected depth, only slightly countered by a tendency towards an unresolved sentimentality in poems such as Bob's yer Uncle and Monaco.
Also, when he takes a sardonic look at himself in the mirror (Lying in the mirror) and sees an old man "just like me but older", you get a real sense of the human being behind the poems, which is really what many writers are trying to put across.
All in all, this collection leaves you wanting to see more of the poet's work, which is surely the purpose of a pamphlet publication. I think there's more to come from Dennis Leckey, and I, for one, look forward to seeing it in print.
Adrian Green
Other reviews by Adrian Green:
Dramatic Fictions - Collections by Rupert Mallin, Steve Anderson and others.