He Claims He Is the Direct Heir.

He Claims He Is the Direct Heir by poet and lawyer Lazar Sarna is a diverse compilation gathered from poems written over a period of about 20 years, ranging from the easily accessible to Sarna’s more challenging surrealist style. The poems are imbued with a wry tone and humour tinged with sarcasm and these intimations of particularity along with ancestral history allow his unique voice to ring out with what it is to be human.

Sarna invokes the “we” of collective heritage. In other poems, the “I,” “he,” or “she” suggest connections, past and present, to “families with long names” descended from “worry and all the rest from joy.” Allusions to “unending blessing and unending night” together with the juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated things in “Peel of a Sad Cello,” wherein Sarna’s surrealist style is most evident, or his poignant “We Cry Out,” bring to mind Anne Michaels’ work. Otherwise, the tone of the two poets is not comparable and the incongruity within Sarna’s lines are rather quirky, if not problematic for readers.

With biting wit, contrariety and stoicism emanate as Sarna probes the complexities of relationships. Perhaps due to Sarna’s experience as a lawyer, there are no pretenses. A wife states, “I don’t like you / I don’t like the children you made for me.” A father proclaims, “my daughter should not marry anyone in that family” and a mother-in-law announces, “no way her son would live with a person as thin as a shelf.” At the same time traditional values prevail; a daughter-in-law responds to her aging mother-in-law—“a jagged top of a can towards her”—by washing her back and bringing her soup. Still, there is tension between tradition and acculturation as “the child’s child doesn’t long for Jaffa.” With the pragmatism of one whose “place” is where “all fruits wait to explode and injure,” Sarna declares, “torn things stay torn” but “bereavement ends tomorrow.”

The collection abounds with both intimacy and idiosyncrasy that, somehow, seems oddly familiar; and while Lazar Sarna’s surrealistic style challenges the reader, a second reading proves to be rewarding.