Ramshackle Ode

April 1, 2016

In his lovely first collection, Pushcart Prize nominee Leonard offers poems both tough and tender about becoming a man--effectively so, as these works are not full of false bravado but touching reflection. "A boy should this and a boy should that," he says of the pressures shaping the male trek in life, and elsewhere an anxious father's ultrasound view of a growing fetus quietly expands to a greater understanding of the world. From hayfields and splatting June bugs to cow's udders and a woodstove's warmth, Leonard's backdrop is rural, but his appeal will be larger; one of his finest poems, opening with the obvious outsideness of strawberries, wends its way to Icarus and tellingly concludes, "There must have been a moment/ he could go no further, / and yet, he did." VERDICT Charmed and sturdy poems for a wide range of readers.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2016
As the word ramshackle suggests, Leonard's debut poetry collection conveys fragility in a flickering flame in Memorial, a shoe-bruised stretch of silt in After Foreclosure, a trembling silhouette in Sovereignty. Through a number of startling odes and brief histories, Leonard harvests a landscape of dazzling disrepair. In A Brief History of Silence, for example, he grapples with the quiet fluidity of darkness. In Ode to Dreaming the Dead, he invokes a pasture of staring horses. And in Ode to the Odes, he likens the round / of a partner's nostril to the wheels / on the carts / in the cobble streets / of Babel. Time and again, parts of the natural worldstrawberry seeds, milkweed, and unknowable constellationsare coupled with instances of human vulnerability, from scabs and sore shoulders to the drum of an embryonic heart. Enchantingly, these juxtapositions are often accompanied by playful variations in syntax (in Elegy, three words this, isn't, and it? are repeatedly inverted to spectacular effect) as well as spurts of humor ( My banker calls me / by my pet name: Sir, Leonard writes in The Name of My Banker ). Intriguing and triumphant, Leonard's collection embodies the subject matter it so aptly depicts, whether it's a storm or steeple or meadow.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)