Dinner at Madonna’s

by Kevin Irie

Kevin Irie’s Dinner at Madonna’s explores the fusion of personal and historic memory and nationality within the context of growing up in multicultural Canada. A third generation Japanese-Canadian, he writes:

Memory is the country I hold
as a citizen displaced
by my time in the world.

Reviews

Kevin Irie’s book is his third, and, for my money, the best, most mature collection here… These poems scale the upper reaches of Parnassus and bring back the news. ~Richard Stevenson, The Lethbridge Insider

Irie’s work is beautifully restrained as it moves from Toronto to Italy to British Columbia, and out of that restraint comes some truly arresting images. In Sunday at the Vatican, for example we encounter the Pope at a window as “a lone tooth in an ancient mouth,” with a red tapestry below him “like a panting tongue”. The strength of Dinner is the frequency with which Irie lets such images speak for themselves, avoiding the temptation to overwrite them or bury them in commentary. ~Ian Samuels, The Calgary Herald

The collection takes us sequentially from the streets of Toronto’s Little Italy to the historically rich arteries of Venice, then back to Canada with a new, widened perspective… The work moves from distanced observation of others’ migrations to greater and greater intimacy.” ~Sonnet L’Abbe, The Globe and Mail

Dinner at Madonna’s is Kevin Irie’s third book, a mature and reflective work, full of resonance and depth… Sparse, carefully wrought and lit with piercing imagery, this work is moving and beautiful. ~Barbara Curry Mulcahy, Alberta Views

Here is a poet with a particular past walking through the streets of Venice and Toronto, through art galleries and back alleys, through familiar and foreign mythologies, startling us, arresting us with each unexpected turn of his heart and mind. ~Joy Kogawa

Samples

In Passing

They’re all dying, my uncle
tells me at the latest funeral,
the service in English, Japanese
food served at the home

where the neighbours ask
if the fish in the sushi is really raw,
and how do you eat it,
and does it taste—fishy?

The egg salad sandwiches chosen instead.

The Issei,
                the oldest,
the first generation of immigrants,
most widows, nearing a century.

We rise,
give them a place to sit,
bring them sushi, rice bags,
a cup of green tea
as they peel off white gloves,
place black handbags by the side of the chair,
adjust their rimmed hats one more time
while the talk twists in and out of their hearing.

English is the stranger
who took their children away
from them years and years ago.
There are bean cakes,
coffee cake, side by side;

always the taste of one odd word or another
sticking to the tongue.

Eventually,
you learn to chew and swallow

or else
stay hungry.

Geraniums, Concord Avenue, Toronto

Memory is possession,
and what is my own but
these geraniums blooming
in a Toronto window,

kin to those I recall in Venice,
their floral reds and pinks in challenge
against that city’s domestic grey.

Now, each leaf is a ticket back,
my passage booked by a single glance.
Each red petal a tongue to proffer return;
the soft wax seal of an invitation.

Home, but not settled,
my life is a document
named for planting
in government files.

Memory is the country I hold
as a citizen displaced
by my time in the world.