Harold Rhenisch
Ronsdale
Press,
February 1998. ISBN: 0-921870-55-8 6 x
9 90 pp $13.95
Poetry
Reviews
Mythic and colloquial,
lyrical and elegant, Taking the Breath Away
introduces us to Rhenisch's mature poetic voice in poems
characterized by brilliant imagery and continuous
reinvention. Long known as the poet of the land, the poet
who conjures the land to speak, Rhenisch in this new
collection bridges a host of Western artforms -- gothic,
baroque, folktale, ballad, post-modernism and the surreal --
to extend our "dumbed-down" urban vision. Humorous and
elegaic at once, Taking the Breath Away ranges from
Okanagan farmers and Cariboo ranchers to Plato's Republic
and German cathedrals, from mad King Ludwig of Bavaria to
Van Gogh learning about Canadian snow. These are poems that
lift Canadian colloquial speech into a sophisticated
language that returns the world to a state of
wonder.
Rhenisch's new book is a marvel. It is full of sudden beauty. It moves us into a gentle and terrible world where you can 'lose the wind' or 'taste the river in a stone.' What delight to know there is such a song out there and someone to sing it." Patrick Lane
"In these exquisitely articulated lyrics, Rhenisch, the Meistersinger of Okanagan poetry, resuscitates the ruined choirs in orchards laid bare by cynicism. They will take your breath away." Linda Rogers
In a
previous work, 'Out of the Interior," Rhenisch wrote of the
potency of this place for cultural vision and our inability
to find and keep to it steadily. In that work, we see the
erasure of cultural traces left by a first generation German
orchardist family in the Similkameen. Their vision of a new
culture dies slowly within the abyss of B.C. politics.
"Taking the Breath Away" is in the same vein, but the vision
of promise is more intense. "Salzburg," "Partenkirchen, "
"Freiburg im Breisgau," track his German roots, and by
contrast measure the distance from here, the distance
through which immigrant families have come to shape this
place, "while a black rain falls/in the night of the
cities.His "surreal linkages" and "delicate observations of
nature" are really discoveries of cultural promise,they are
a poetry of place afforded by this landscape and the
potential for meaningful life within it. This is the deeper
structure that makes his imagery less the result of a
surreal technique and more of a vision than Geddes would
allow. Rhenisch is no social outcast, he is really much more
at home here than most of us.
John
Whatley, B.C. Bookworld
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A LAYMAN'S GUIDE TO LITERARY CRITICISM There are some prerequisite tools: musk-oxen circled against the wind, sparse grass, rock. Against a summer sky as blue as ice we stand like cairns of stones pointing the way to winter. Literary criticism is not about literature after all, but about a choice of tools: a Black and Decker variable speed reversing rechargeable drill or a brace and bit. They both make holes. Poetry: a barn full to the roof with hay, and rats running around, squealing; words for winter; translations for snow, that drifts across the yard, out of the air on one side, into the air on the other, and Van Gogh in his last weeks standing out there, watching us fall. Top