Sweet, like Rinky-Dink

Sometimes metaphysical, sometimes apparently confessional, sometimes challenging, often hilarious, Mark Waldron's poems take you by the arm and usher you in to a dark/light, funny/sad, silly/serious world which is exactly what the actual world looks like if you creep up on it and take it by surprise. As human beings living in society we're supposed to keep what we really think hidden, but the poems of Sweet, like Rinky-Dink want to look at the absurdity behind our posturing, because in looking at it squarely in the face we might hope to have some freedom from it. Sweet, like Rinky-Dink is Mark Waldron's fourth collection, following Meanwhile, Trees (2016), published by Bloodaxe, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both from Salt.

Table of Contents:
13 I wish I loved lawnmowers 15 Brute Creation 16 Sixteen Found Dogs 17 The Take-Off 18 Las Aves Vacías 19 Sarouk Mohajeran 21 Your Face 22 Diving for Pearls 23 Sweet, like Rinky-Dink 24 The Stick 25 Light that falls 26 WW1 Marcie 28 What are things 29 The body is a kind of home, 33 Hobnobbing with Elephants 34 A Scabbarding 35 Manno 36 A Drip 37 Oh no, 38 Coming Through! 39 Endpiece 40 Supination 41 How to Get a Gibbet through the Small Hole 42 Poor light, 43 Angry with Trees 44 The Dragonfly and Berries 46 My Hopeless Marcie 47 Ice Cream for I Scream 48 As Though Begat, but Not 49 How scrubbed-up clean 50 The first time I came upon him, 52 How to Tap a Field Mushroom 53 A Closed Sandwich 54 The main event 57 No wonder 58 A Flying Visit 59 Ordinary People, We Just Don’t See Them 60 The Wild West 61 Even now that we live exclusively 63 What are you doing taking the air 64 My God, my Marcie’s got 65 My brain likes fish, 66 My brain is a fool, 67 My boneheaded brain 69 The words you sweat, 70 The Lighthouse Keeper 72 Buddies 73 Even when 74 Trees, Breeze and Rabbits 76 Childhood

About the Author :
Mark Waldron was born in New York in 1960 and grew up in London. He works in advertising and lives in East London with his wife and son. He began writing poetry in his early 40s. He published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), which were followed by two from Bloodaxe, Meanwhile, Trees (2016) and Sweet, like Rinky-Dink (2019).

Review :
I get nervous for Mark Waldron's readers – I can hear them begin to laugh a little, becoming too comfortable too quickly, while reading a poem of his and I want to warn them. I want to yell at them to get out of the way, tell them that what's really happening is that they are about to get their hearts broken. Poor monkeys. Clearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something. His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language…. And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book.