‘Most of Sarna’s poems are humorous and earthbound, but he can soar when he wants to.’
Lazar Sarna’s He Claims He Is the Direct Heir introduces a new tone of voice into Canadian poetry. It is wry and droll, an unexpected melange of Jewish humour and Surrealism. Sarna’s terse lyrics often have the crackle of a good joke, though usually with grim undertones. The voice often grates and is surprisingly scratchy but then, a covert lyricism breaks through. In his best poems, which jar like a wisecrack at a shiva, he seems to be jesting through gritted teeth. His world is at once homely and weird; its oddity unsettles just because we know it so well.
Praise for his breakthrough novel The Man Who Lived Near Nelligan, stemmed from Sarna’s ability to capture the odd, the sharp and the humourous in what appears to be ordinary. He Claims He Is the Direct Heir, a mouthful of a book title, tells the reader about the richness of heritage through some of the freshest and most playful images the author has yet concocted. Trained as an attorney, Sarna skillfully populates his poems with scribes on strike, unsung trianglists, Herzl’s beard, a ‘family of worries’ and a ‘Mother who was a jagged top of a can’. We see them struggling, loving, resisting and expecting to inherit what is there and what is not. This is a voyage of the exotic right at home.