“The barber is someone who creates / by taking away, like a writer / who owns only an eraser,” opens up Jay Leeming’s first collection of poems, Dynamite on a China Plate: Leeming, like the writer in the opening three lines of “The Barber,” is a poet who relies on absence more than presence, in the first group of poems.
At moments, we are left waiting for the explosion of glass, for the “feedback” to eventually swell into an all-out sonic and physical assault. But that doesn’t happen, which might be this collection’s greatest strength—its resistance to crescendo, of the swelling and subsequent bursting. Instead, appropriately, as the last poem closes, we are left waiting for “... new words / beyond these words.”
Leeming is not a volatile or explosive poet, even in his funniest moments. Rather, he is a deliberate wordsmith, one with the tact and restraint that allows for more than the Wow at the linguistic apex. Consider “I Pick Up a Hitchhiker,” quoted here in its entirety:
After a few miles, he tells me
that my car has no engine.
I pull over, and we both get out
and look under the hood.
He’s right.
We don’t say anything more about it
all the way to California.
In this poem, as in others in Dynamite, Leeming relies not on linguistic, but situational flourishes; he says only what needs to be said when he needs to say it. And, in many of these poems, what is left unsaid is the truly heightened moment. This strategy upholds the momentum in later poems like “Joke” (“Fuck Buddhism I’m dying. Every day more cells in my body drive fast cars into brick walls”).
His 83-page collection is nuanced, and yet, even when his most humorous moments are paired with somber subjects, he maintains a tonal uniformity, a significant feat.
He works as comfortably in six lines as he does in 100, with line breaks and without, and his talent with memory and human interaction is inspirational. It’s hard not to conjure images of a poet like Robert Bly—who offers considerable praise for this collection on its back cover—writing poems like these, a series which manages to be sparse yet expansive, serious yet silly. This is a poet of contradictions who accomplishes an impressive feat in his first collection.