A fabulous collection, The Last House, British Columbian Michael Kenyon's third full-length volume (following Rack of Lamb and The Sutler), wrestles with conceptions of “self” and “otherness” from the get-go in its finely crafted divagations:
“In a new country you neither / belong nor don't but hope to guess your soul's / purpose.”
Kenyon, born in the UK, came home from away in 1967; thus, issues of emigration in the lost and foundering spirit of settling sinuously dominate these exquisitely shaped reflections, combining the physical vernacular with the visionary spectacular.
The Last House, by Michael Kenyon, Brick, 111 pages, $19
What makes a homeland a home; how can a house turn upsy-turvily into a haven for sorrow and joy; and, most keenly, why has “the climax of the capitalist dream and the urge (nostalgia?) for a simpler life . . . a small house, a smaller house, no house” driven citizens of this grievous world to the fringes of muddle-class despair? Here's What We Have:
… Exile breathes in the fat shadows of trees.
I give up listing my different selves,
measuring the distance from outside to
inside, from urban to rural. The thump
of a grouse intersects the jet's thin jazz.
The walls of this world are quite soft and rain
on palm fronds whispers like people coming
through the forest whose floor unleashes green
heads of new ferns. I keep going over
the same ground. Ghosts, music, all under wraps.
Contributing reviewer and In Other Words blogger Judith Fitzgerald lives in Northern Ontario's Almaguin Highlands. She is completing her 30th work, a poetry collection provisionally titled Rogue Lightning, slated for 2010 release.
