Rack of Lamb

By Michael Kenyon

Michael Kenyon's Rack of Lamb is a compelling study in voice. Organized loosely around various foods, the book brings together the voices of several women and a young girl, all from the same community but representing various social and cultural groups, subtly but powerfully joined by major social and political events. The power in Kenyon's book, however, lies not only in his uncanny ability to articulate strongly developed characters in one or two brief passages, but also in his ability to evoke a re-examination of the relationship between the individual, the mundane and the worldly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 1991
• ISBN: 9781771310758

Michael Kenyon

Michael Kenyon is the author of numerous poetry collections and novels. His novel The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award, and his work has been shortlisted for The Commonwealth Writers Prize and the National Magazine Awards. He divides his time between Vancouver and Pender Island, having in both places a therapeutic practice. 

Book preview

Rack of Lamb

Rack of Lamb

Michael Kenyon

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Kenyon, Michael.

    Rack of lamb

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-48-3

1. Title.

PS8571.E59R32 1991    c8n′.54    C91-093108-9

PR9199.3.K46R32 1991

Brick Books gratefully acknowledges the assistance of The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

The author thanks Marlene Cookshaw, Marnie Parsons and Sue Schenk.

© Michael Kenyon, 1991.

Brick Books

www.brickbooks.ca

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

This book is for Muriel and Tom.

I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together.   Erik Satie

Soon the dam will be completed. It is an immense wall that will seal off the valley from one mountain to the other, creating a lake more than five miles around. We will have to vacate our home to make room for it.   Ibuse Masuji

PEPPERS

Peppers

Any day you can go out the door and meet somebody and change your life. Mary please this minute leave what you're doing, fetch Angelina with the long nails to come peel peppers. That's how I feel today, everything is clear and each thing different. Don't slam the door, child!

Last night I dreamed of going to the doctor's to get my stitches out. I've half a year's birth control pills left, seems such a waste, you know? So in the dream I ask could he maybe give them to someone? Weirdest dream.

Well let's see, he says. Didn't you open any?

No, I say, why should I?

Look! he says. And he peels back the foil from each pack and shows me, one after another, these real cute arrangements of can-dies: licorice allsorts, jelly beans, dark chocolates.

Angelina's coming, good, I hope you told her right away, not next week. Take those gulls, now. Three gulls all the same you think but look close, take your time with each one, make your mind a picture, no, a movie, because they fly and you follow, one at a time, all different. Turn the peppers will you Bruno? Yes of course they're hot, use the stick, all right the mittens if you like, but don't burn them on the element. I love the smell, kind of smoky, kind of sharp – for heaven's sake pull out the rack Bruno, don't reach in like that. So anyway, you never know when you're gonna walk down the street and meet somebody very important. Where is that girl? They should be black, black like scorched, all over. And maybe it's somebody you already know, someone you've known for a long time, maybe your whole life. I don't say it's likely, but you got to admit it's possible.

Fiddlehead Greens

Sometimes at night I stand in the living room and twitch open the drapes and stare down at the trees rising from the valley. Let my eyes follow the highway, the lines of headlights leading through the dark, and imagine I'm leaving. Last year I fell in love with a Mormon missionary and went to Salt Lake City and watched slide shows for a week. I was baptized in a swimming pool. I had an underwater vision. I saw a tree whose leaves turned into birds, the flock of birds flew away in the shape of a tree. I couldn't look at anyone afterward, not even the man I thought I was in love with. The first person I made eye contact with was a floor girl in Safe-way fruit and vegetables. She had the most beautiful translucent skin I've ever seen. I copied her name from the tag she wore – I would pretend she was a distant cousin, so I could save her. Sometimes when I stare out I get very frightened, I say to myself over and over, Gone mad with foreboding, gone mad with foreboding – I read it in Reader's Digest once – gone mad with foreboding, till the words seem completely