Stan Rice. Some Lamb. The Figures, 1975.

Recovery Project by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

“Remember the world of ghosts and small gestures.”

Jon Anderson, “Helpful Hints.”

Stan Rice is best known as the husband of novelist Anne Rice. Although he taught creative writing at SF State from the mid-60’s through 1989, his poetry is more rumored about than read. Some Lamb was one of the first books published by The Figures, a press better known for publishing language poetry. On the cover is the grainy black and white photo of a little girl and the small, bright red letters spelling out the title. Published within a year of Interview With a Vampire, like that book it too is concerned with death and children and blood, but it is more a work of grief than horror. It circles around the death of the Rice’s daughter Michelle, at the age of six, of leukemia. Not decorous, not contained, in debt to Blake and nursery rhymes, sloppy and overwhelming in parts, Some Lamb drags the elegy into the ‘70’s, when free verse still boiled with possibility. It is nothing less than the most heartbreaking book of American poetry.

The book is divided into two sections, “During” and “After.” “During” begins with poems of fatherhood, interactions and play. Glasses of milk, pets (kittens, dogs and goldfish). “Green daddies/ can. Apples in the dustpan. (12)” Ten poems in what gets hinted about becomes explicit:

And here’s his eyeflash at the pan of needles

Each in its own wrapper like a witch’s gland

When he took his child in for her checkup

And they kept her and put a tube in her wrist

And a strip of witch’s skin over her hand.”

“Homecoming” (20)

The first section is studded with rhyming language that careens between childlike nursery rhymes and more adult uses of form, to evoke or to twist. Adrienne Rich describes form as a pair of asbestos gloves one uses to hold what is too painful to touch, but in Rice’s case form only multiplies what is painful. The awkwardness of the rhymes announce pain, lets vulnerabilities into the text, to explain what can’t be explained, to himself or his wife or his child. In “The Last Supper” Rice narrates God as if he were a character in a fairytale: “He got hungry and he needed some silverware so he opened/ My daughter and he said, Look at this here little faceful of bones:/ FORKS & KNIVES & SPOONS AND BUTTERKNIVES. (25)” He crosses a child’s delight in difference and naming (not just knives, but knives and butterknives) with more adult epithets: “Zero with teeth, leukemia licker, slut. (25)” The thirty poems in the section feel chronological, journal-torn. Tonally the poems don’t level, even when they’re flat they pick up charge from the other poems around them. The matter-of-factness of “Sonnet”’s “No more child. Much less fathering/ therefore. Much less mothering to know, (32)” just aches the more it settles in. The first section is flooded with food and eating references, of eating and being eaten as a metaphor for being consumed by time, most clearly in “Eating It,” “Can’t eat sleep./ Sleep eats me./ Day it eats/ What time can’t be (38)” and in the title poem, which ends the section and takes William Blake’s figure of the lamb, of innocence, a creation of God, and a metaphor for their daughter, and renders it as food:

The night is fed

With shapes which fit so tight

This vest of ribs

We scream we beg

Time stop it! stop it!

And yet

That was

Some lamb

Some lamb

Says Death.

(43)

What makes the first section of Some Lamb so harrowing is its directness, its closeness. For all the intensity of the language, the images, metaphors and symbols, the references etc., all the words that make these poems work as poems, there is no space between the subject and the language around the subject; in the poems there’s no room to move away from the pain and grief and shock and horror of not just a child dying but this particular child, Michelle Rice, six years old, most likely the girl in the photograph on the cover, the daughter of the poet Stan Rice and the novelist Anne Rice, in San Francisco, in 1972, of leukemia. A lamb.

The second section, “After,” moves, mercifully, from the territory of Rice’s daughter’s presence further into the space of memory and how it gets mapped in words. It opens with “Four Wolves,” a casual narrative set in a bar that deliberately goes nowhere, “We were just shimmering there at the table/ and nothing mattered...” “& there we were/ outside all butchery/ of TIME or CONTENT or RELEVANCE or NECESSITY. (48)” It marks where “during” (continuity, of being in and part of what is happening) stops, and where “after” (stopping, of being apart and past what has happened) begins. It is a fiction, as Rice explores in many of these poems, but a necessary one. As such the poems in this section have a cooler, more meditative quality. In “Getting Voiced,” Rice declares, “I would lie down & turn/ from the metaphors/ no more. Purple jaws, ivory nails, lust of the body./ Yes. (82)” Or in “Excess Is Ease,” “Dread is the fear of being less/ forever. So bend. Bend down and kiss/ what you see. (73)”

Some Lamb is not language poetry, but it does share that movement’s concern with the consequences of poetic language and rhetoric. The poems bump into all kinds of different slippages, it’s even disjunctive in spots. The book meditates on the problem of reference, but this meditation is not shaped by a desire to critique either poetics or society but because tragedy unhinges sense. As Rice puts it in “Four Days In Another City,”

pulled one way by Things

and one by Thoughts

gives you this

kissed-by language-rabbit

take it

a black one & a white one

for god’s sake take it

before it dies

and becomes

Literal Thing again

mere madeless mute

and barren rabbit,

only ink.

(92-93)

Stan Rice retired from SF State in 1989, moved to New Orleans with his wife, and took up painting. Several of his poems were featured in her books. A selected poems, Singing Yet, was published by Knopf in 1992, and he published four more books after that. He died of a brain tumor in 2002, at the age of sixty. Some Lamb is long out of print, copies listed on Bookfinder range between $66.25 for a paperback to $753.50 for a signed hardcover edition.