‘The Inflatable Life’ loses its message to its medium

The Inflatable Life
Mark Laba, 73 pgs, Anvil Press, anvilpress.com, $18

I did not like much of Mark Laba’s so-called poetry, which has little rhyme or music or form, but instead a lot of offensive imagery that he seems to be throwing in the reader’s face.

However, he also has a love of word play, a freaky originality and the ability to be the poet who breaks your heart.

He demonstrates this in “The Bruised Sunset,” where an adult narrator — triggered by the colour of the sky — remembers his failure to intervene in a shameful schoolyard bullying incident when he was a child. That memory causes “a pain that reaches across years / stinging like a jellyfish, / inadvertent , unseen, undulating on the / murky waters of memory, blind / and muddied with shame.” In “German Without Toil,” which references “the war,” there is a restaurant where a porter is yelling “Hot sausages!”

In the second stanza, we are told a young man and his parrot “lie beneath the wreckage of charred bodies that / children are told the storks brought. ‘Please, miss’ / the parrot says, ‘one liver and one blood sausage / and could you beat them gently with a rubber-soled shoe.”

This is well-crafted horror with a punch. Laba has a habit of bringing venerated poets into his works, even if they get the same mistreatment applied to most of his subjects.

In “Smallpox for Dummies,” he treats us to the lines: “like a first snowfall in Vermont / not far from where Robert Frost / had diarrhea beneath the very tree / where he lost his pinochle.”