Poems of disturbing beauty, examining personal and collective loss.

This is Michael Kenyon's third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching, amid the wreckage of its loves.

? It is useless to
choose a direction: current must find us.

At last we swim away from each other
to make the storm less jealous, old stars freeze
the water, earthquakes calve an island, and
another me adores another you
inland.
— from "The Stars"

Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, The Last House stands on the brink of devastation — personal, ancestral, cultural. There is transcendence here, but no redemption: it is too late. But this is also a book about love — protean, violent, perduring — love as the key to reality, even as it mystifies us or tears us apart. These are poems of deep and disturbing vision, sustained by electrifying honesty.

Michael Kenyon was born in Sale, England, and has lived on the West Coast since 1967. He’s the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction. The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award for best novel. Other work has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Baxter Hathaway Prize (Cornell) in fiction, The Malahat Review Novella Prize, Prism international’s fiction contest (won twice), the Journey Prize, and the National and Western Magazine Awards. He has adjudicated for the Banff Centre writing program, for the BC Arts Council, and for the Saskatchewan Arts Board. He has been employed as a seaman, a diver, and a taxi driver. Presently he works as a freelance editor and a therapist, and divides his week between Pender Island and Vancouver.

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