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Free Will is certainly one of the year's singular poetry collections, a work of both charm and power, two qualities not often found together. He writes about Shakespeare, about playing Shakespeare, about reading and interpreting Shakespeare -- and, astonishingly, it's all fascinating, thanks to the vigour of his reinventive imagination and the breadth of his technique.
In Ontario's 416 area code, many people associate culture with modern-dress versions of Shakespeare -- hip-hop Hamlets, Desdomeonas with the navel rings and the tops of their thongs showing, that sort of thing. Tornto considers attendance at such productions essential to middle-class education. In what's for me the most memorable section of his book,
Rhenisch does something quite different. He continues on with sonnets where Shakespeare left off, using contemporary language to address equally contemporary situations but, by doing so, showing what timelessness really means in literature. George Fetherling, The Vancouver Sun
A "Shakespeare-Houdini" himself, Rhenisch romps, struts, sings recitative and aria, sashays, and stomps the floorboards of Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and poetically riffs on The Mouse Trap: Seventeen Stagings of a Play Within a Play. As versatile as his poetic tricks/styles/genres are, his voice also speaks from within Puck, fool, clown, chimpanzee, the dead, and the victims of the Bard's theatricality: Ophelia, Iago, and Desdemona, among others, holding forth for their 15 minutes. Maestro of the imagination, in "The Tragedy of Ophelia, Hamlet Redux," Rhenisch modernizes and catapults Ophelia "onto a stage/ in front of a crowd yelling English// like a bear in a pit,/ a captured Pictish princess painted blue".
Celebrating Shakespeare, echoing Wordsworth, Rhenisch takes us on a dramaturgical pilgrimage where "what/ you say in this court matters not,// that you know yourself at last (I squeeze your arm), that truth is a lie" ). And we give our hands to him gladly, standing in ovation, so that the play can resume. "When the actors come again . . . // the stage is empty--there is not a footprint in the dust". And when we reflect upon humanity's brief historic blip, Rhenisch kickstarts the Catherine Wheel: "They begin immediately to rehearse,// so they don't forget their lines at night,/ which is always the greatest danger-- / remembering that they are playing a part,/ which the midnight actors are dying to forget". We are theatre, actors, clowns, and consequence, floored by Rhenisch's magnificent liturgy. Katerina Fretwell. Prairie Fire
What poet Harold Rhenisch does in this, his twelfth, collection is carry the coyote hijinks of his collections Taking the Breath Away (Ronsdale Press, 1998) and The Blue Mouth of Morning (Oolichan Books, 1998) over to the worlds of Shakespearean and Absurdist theatre. Along the way, he folds in all manner of public discourse, pop culture allusions, current events, and theatric legerdemain. We get new takes on old Shakespearean plays &endash; Hamlet from Ophelia's and Gertrude's points of view; Iago's extemporaneous meditations on Romeo, Juliet, Oberon, Rosalind, Shylock, Bach's harpsichord fugues, "Singing In The Rain;" cut scenes of Oberon filling his rainbow codpiece, and Falstaff planting tobacco in Virginia, etc. Puns, groaners, longeurs, guffaws: it's all uproarious good fun!
The book offers much more than this, of course, as the title implies: it's not simply a matter of freeing old Will from the stultifying effect of so much classroom analysis and getting the characters to sit up on their hind legs, as it were, but is a matter of examining the philosophical implications and limitations upon the free will of individuals trying desperately to make sense of their lives in these insane, genocidal times.
Indeed, with this book, Harold Rhenisch confirms his status as one of the most inventive and witty poets on the Canadian scene, and while there are cognitive delights aplenty here, he has not sacrificed readability or accessibility to the making of this fine Mulligan stew. Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Carnival, the sequel, is the book I've been waiting for ever since I read Rhenisch's Out of the Interior: The Lost Country. In Carnival, Rhenisch switches from creative nonfiction to fiction. He marries his father's voice to his own to create Hansel (Hans), a narrator who speaks facts, truth, and poetry to tell the story "that has needed to be told for fifty-three years."
Carnival is about so many ideas, the story itself would be enough, but there is more. There is the exquisite beauty of the writing--the density of detail, depth, a cacophony of sounds, the symphony of images and motifs. Rhenisch's understanding has caught up with his mastery of technique, which also shone through Out of the Interior. His poetry augments his themes. Here in Carnival, the magic realism is intended to document Hans' dissociation. It rings psychologically true, showing how the child Hans' dreams, nightmares, and visions help him cope with the bodies falling around him. His "flights" are tricks his mind plays in order to keep him alive. Style and content are perfectly integrated. By melding the voices from the earlier volume of father and son, Rhenisch has effectively quieted the fearful child that was himself and has opened the door for the fearful child that was his father. And what horrors the child speaks; what horrors he sees.
Carnival reminds us that wars, like gods, are always personal, reflections of our interior human landscapes. There is no mention of Hitler here, nor of the German nation, but readers can read. "[I]nstead of fighting other people, " Hans says, "you and your enemies must fight the war." [p. 184] The war includes the storks' war against the frogs and Mama and Papa's battles as much as it includes the Swedish invaders and the Black French soldiers marching over Romans roads to occupy the town again. "That is what no one understood about that time. In all my years in Canada, in the golden wheat fields and the glaciers under the northern lights at the end of the world, people never understood that: the war never ended; we never destroyed the war -- it is inside of us . . . " [p. 184]
To make this novel stand more firmly alone, I would insert the scene from Out of the Interior of the bombed schoolchildren, "Education Under Attack." It is alluded to in "Section 13, Air Attack, Shovelling," p. 115, but it was more pivotal to Hansel's trauma and needs to be repeated. Then, I do hope Rhenisch plans to market Carnival outside Canada; it has international, national, and universally personal significance. Reading it makes me feel proud to be Canadian. A story that needed to be told is now a book that needs to be shared. J. M. Bridgeman Prairie Fire
A similar reverence for the anecdotal past occasionally sabotages Harold Rhenisch's otherwise brilliant Carnival. The book's genesis was apparently long and arduous. In 1984 Rhenisch taped his father's troubling stories of life in a small town in Southern Germany during World War II. Rhenisch put the stories together by 1987, but did not publish them for another 11 years, learning German, traveling to Germany and slowly realizing that his father's original form was irretrievable. Instead, Rhenisch decided to "enter" his father to "help him understand the more difficult parts of his story," even as his father brought out the hidden roots of Rhenisch's own story.
The results are often nothing less than astounding.
Rhenisch allows the dead to speak in profoundly affecting ways, and Carnival has a cumulative force that builds as Hansel witnesses greater and greater suffering, about which he is able to do less and less
According to the book's back cover, Rhenisch is one of Canada's master prose stylists, and that's not far off, even if you haven't heard of him. Reinhold Kramer, Canadian Literature 173
Carnival strikes a rich motherlode in the otherwise minimalist saltpan of contemporary fiction.
Carnival can stand beside anything by Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom Rhenisch cites as influences, though it's more like a painting by Marc Chagall or Kurt Schwitters: a volatile mix of memory, nightmare and memoir blended into fiction by a writer who heard the original text as a child, from his father. The consciousness gap between people who were involved in the Second World War, who became survivors and immigrants, and those who didn't is vast. Carnival captures his father's luminous memoirs of a European village childhood that was transformed from idyll to nightmare by external forces. It is a tragedy that cannot every truly be reconciled with a later life lived in what Rhenisch calls an "earthly Paradise" for European immigrants, the rural back-country of British Columbia. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun
Long respected by academics and fellow poets, Rhenisch has gained a reputations as a writer's writer, a proud regionalist who produces deep, high-quality work while staying well out of the limelight. But his under-the-radar status is about to change. Tom Thomson's Shack confirms Rhenisch as one of the most perceptive and distinctive essayists currently writing in Canada.
With Tom Thomson's Shack, Rhenisch proves that the unique adaptation of a magic-realist style to non-fiction, combined with an episodic structure that would be quicksand to most writers wasn't just a brilliant fluke in Out of the Interior, but a technique he has mastered completely. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun.
The Blue Mouth of Morning (1998)
Turn your Chevy off the Cariboo Highway at 108 Mile Ranch, and you'll pass Shakespeare toiling in his lawnmower shop, see Plato cruising timber on a new cutblock, even laugh at the antics of a notorious rodeo clown named Amadeus Mozart. Keep driving through The Blue Mouth of Morning, Harold Rhenisch's new collection of poems, and you'll enter a depiction of B.C.'s bleakly beautiful Cariboo Plateau as steeped in history and myth as Sheila Watson's novel The Double Hook. David Leach. Monday Magazine. 1999.
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 his new collection of poems Taking the Breath Away Harold Rhenisch reveals the pioneering poetic line that will usher us into the 21st century. His is a poetry that touches lightly on many styles, plays with "isms," and then skips forward into fresh new insights. These are poems that transform themselves continually, evoking the feeling that anything might happen, that the future continually leaps free of the present. Known as the poet of the land, Rhenisch enacts in many of these new works the rural rhythms of the Cariboo, the high volcanic plateau between the mighty Eraser and Thompson rivers where he makes his home. The echo of the loons, a horse standing alone in a pasture of thistles, the silent shapes of fish gliding beneath the ice &emdash; all these reveal the alchemy of this ancient land. Yet Rhenisch is equally at ease in the cities of Europe, reflecting on why it was the burghers built no shelters for the angels, only dark, cold and windy cathedrals. Whether it is out on the Canadian ranch land or inside the Dom at Freiburg, Rhenisch enables us to hear an ancient voice from beyond the urban grid, a voice that calls us home into an endlessly changing present. Ronald B. Hatch
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
Harold Rhenisch's sixth book of poetry establishes his mature poetic voice; it is impossible to capture this visionary/apocalyptic marvel in one review. Lyrical as the writings of Old Testament prophets and epic poets, it is divided into a mystic trinity; A Field Guide to Angels,The Lake is Bottomless, and The Missing Water. Rhetorically, the poems leap from the elegiac, bardic, gothic, colloquial,and ballad forms to enthrall, disturb, titillate, and strike terror and awe in the mesmerized reader.
Through his trickster wizardry, angels incarnate, postmodern litcrit trembles, Cariboo country dances to the magic wind, animals speak in parable,the canonized arise, and German cathedrals bear witness. Rural stereotypes disintegrate in a swirl of poetic imagery which restores silent forgotten places tot heir rightful clairvoyance, particularly since the millennium looms. Quietly persuasive, Rhenisch's wily narrator undercuts our cynical "Waste Land' with enticements to see the angels, beware the wind, and hear the musical spheres of a world truly grieved and revisioned.
Influenced by Eliot and Rilke, Rhenisch mirrors the latter's fiercely optimistic vision forged out of accepting death and life as one indivisible whole. Rhenisch's darkness (loneliness, death, alienation, loss) is in separate form his light (hope, faith, love, renewal). Alchemizing the angels, wind, dark night, cathedrals, and rain in Rilke's Duino Elegies, Rhenisch addresses the terrible yet joyful human condition -- with wit, verve, genius,a and abiding compassion. Taking the Breath Away's opening eponymous poem, set in Cariboo country, ends with a sense of both alienation and wondere.
Rhenisch truly succeeds in standing on the shoulders of modernist titans and ancient tricksters; his postmodern deconstructions are a hoot, his allusive vision breaks new ground, and his titles and endnotes helpfully reveal his sources. Taking the Breath Away is a difficult but dazzling read which requires much time for reflection. Kathy Fretwell. Prairie Fire. Vol 20. No . 1
Sometimes you read a book and tremble at the prospect of reviewing it. Harold Rhenisch' s Taking the Breath Away was such a one for me. It is so unlike what I write myself, what I normally choose to read, that I know understanding it is going to involve an act of transformation on my part, an abandonment of usual thought patterns, a willingness to be led into unfamiliar and unsettling territory. Surrealism coupled with intimacy: strange bedfellows. In these poems we encounter saplings that giggle, horses that recite Mallarme, stoned crows retuning from a concert of the Grateful Dead and a man who plans to write "A Field Guide to Angels" because they aren't included in any field guide to the birds he's ever seen. Little narrative or sequential logic here. Forget that and give yourself up to whimsy, jarring juxtapositions, association spreading outwards like ripple s of water when a pebble is dropped in. "Against a summer sky blue as ice/we stand like cairns of stones/ pointing the way to winter." (A Layman's Guide to Literary Criticism"). Now, I have scant idea what that means, but it's lovely, isn't it? "Poetry: a barn full to the roof with hay,/ and rats running around, squealing;" (same poem). Well, I kind of like that too, though it makes little conventional sense. These poems convey the texture of a life with its auctions of tractors and hay rakes, rail fences, men with broken a amber nails, oil drums and fish boats rusting and rotting in the bay. The matter-of-fact tone and colloquial syntax are overlaid with more than a smattering of book learning, knowledge confirmed by and integrated into a rich, though often harsh, life. Many are send-ups on 'book larnin', while preserving an underlying respect for it, as though Rhenisch's needs to reduce it to his own terms to make us of it. "Reading Eliot with One Hand Tie Behind Your Back" captures the sense of Eliot while dismissing his loftier pronouncements. The enchanting "A Guide to Euclidian Geometry" distills high thought to a few essential truths. Chummy and warm, yet often mythic in scope (see; "At the Beginning of the World" and "The City Without Angels"), this is the work of a mature poet who gets away with writing without irony or cynicism, with an innocence that refuses to be corrupted by life's hardships. Replete with horses and angels existing side by side; the sounds of breathing, violins and pianos; it is no whitewash, depicting sun and snow in equal measure. I cam away from this book with my sense rearranged, charmed by a sensibility very different from mine, one that gave me a new vantage point from which to view the world.: .Pat Jasper. Arc Spring 1999
In a field where there is so much abstraction, Harold Rhenisch's poetry is grounded in reality. He manages to get his message across creatively without hitting the reader over the head or leaving them scratching their temples. He approaches his subject with freshness and enthusiasm and from all sides. His attention to detail blurs the line between what is real and what is potential and through this vision he manages to make what seemed old new again. Julie Strachan
As the title implies, this is an exuberantly fantastical book, which is, by turns and sometimes together, surreal, satirical, lyrical, incantatory and aphoristic. It is also a wonderfully happy, life-accepting book in which the figure of the Lord becomes part of our daily absurdities and in which psalms may celebrate the lace teddy as well as pay tv and the morning sun. This is an exhilarating book. Robin Skelton Reference West, March 1995
Dancing With My Daughter (1993)
Drifting north from the Similkameen to the Cariboo, Rhenisch is a kind of Steppenwolf who manages to combine both the populism of wanna-be work poets and the subtleties of "poets' poet." The orchardist and the haiku poet both believe in the value of pruning, and there is a farmer's economy of effort which lends emotional and intellectual incandescence to very line Rhenisch writes. Reading him always makes you feel as though you're sitting at a farmhouse kitchen table late at night with a stack of books and a glass of something from the cellar, kids and stock safely abed, and an hour or two to talk quietly about what it all means. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun
HAROLD RHENISCH WRITES INTENSELY LYRICAL POETRY. Breath and rhythm become modifiers for imagery.
The colour of the grass this morning, the wind has dissipated into a stillness. Like the clouds-lifting off the scree in September, the valley air full of the cider of apple harvest, draining the breath out of a man's thoughts in the morning, in clouds-
He takes three and a half lines to complete the rhyme of "stillness" with "harvest" but the lyric is thus created and made intricate by the parallel images of colourless grass, dissipated wind and breathless thoughts sur- rounding the rhyme. This is poetry with the complex bouquet of a fine wine, redolent of what the wine contains, but also of what once contained the wine.
Wind rushing across the field like a cloak swirled around the shoulders in anger
is a concrete metaphor, but a metaphor in motion-not a stockstill object on view in a display case. These days few poets attempt such serious lyric-making. Too often it's cut on cynicism or a distancing skepticism. Besides, lyricism can be a house of cards. Rhenisch proves this contention in a few poems when he allows the poetic language to get the better of the poem. For example in "Fyn"-a love poem which isn't much of a love poem-he diddles about with the odour of a colour ("the odour / of a pale blue light") far too long. The sensuality of odour is all but lost as the poet searches for the possibility of it as a connecting image. Yet for every failure he has an amplitude of success, and if I admire his lyricism I enthuse over his simplicity. "There is no wealth / but what we draw from this soil" and "... the small altars / of household need" are two examples of the concision which contrasts his lyricism. In fact this marriage of starkness and ornament culminates in the most pleasurable poem in the volume: "The Pear Boxes." It is a lengthy ruminative poem that travels back in time with object (the pear boxes), sallies forth with idea ("a form of fire"), and sets us down finally in the present:
I am tearing the broken ones to shreds-the wood is now too soft and will hold no new nails; they have come this far, ... to become again ... kindling for the winter.
Rhenisch puts the whole of the poem down so carefully on paper that it becomes a wonder. Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
Rhenisch's finest writing examines what happens when "you break apart the sacred geometry/of the mind" ("Water"). "Water" is a luminous piece of writing worth the entire book. "The Stuffed Pheasant" too is a serious self-questioning, though syntax fails it at the end. "The Pear Boxes" is an oddly persuasive long poem, an evocative, quasi-biblical braiding of sensual detail and homely facts, and only superficially a history of fruit boxes. Books In Canada, February 1994
Though Gustafson doesn't seem about to drop the torch, there are a few poets poised to catch it: Barry Dempster and Anne Michaels back east, and B.C.'s Harold Rhenisch and Norm Sibum (wherever he is). You can count on any of them to shovel the walk when Gustafson's gone,but it won't change the fact that we'll have lost one of the greatest poets this country and the English language has ever produced. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun, May 7, 1994
In the promotional material for Out of the Interior: The Lost Country, the publisher proclaims that in this work Harold Rhenisch has succeeded in "extending the forms of autobiography." This work not only lives up to its billing, but may even exceed it. Rhenisch's memoir of growing up on his family's farm in the Okanagan region of British Columbia is a fascinating portrayal of the immigrant experience in North America, and a perceptive commentary on the misguided ways in which humans have tried to control the land.
Rhenisch's memories of his family's farm are closely tied to those of his father, a German immigrant. Like John Muir, who wrote about life on his father's Wisconsin farm over a century ago, Rhenisch learns that the confrontational stance towards the land, a stance that his father brought with him from the old world, is a self-defeating one: "over and over again my father was being taught a lesson, but he did not realize it until it was too late and he had lost even the land he loved." His father's hands &emdash; restlessly grasping &emdash; are a symbol of his approach to farming, as was his futile attempt to keep nature at bay by saturating the farm with lethal pesticides that poison the sprayers as well as the sprayed. Despite the family's efforts, the farm was only a marginal proposition economically, and when it failed it took the family with it: "From that moment on, we were never a family again. The farm was all we had."
Piecing together the diffuse and often opaque images that our memories are comprised of is not the tidy, chronological process that is suggested by most autobiographical writing. Like dimly recalled dreams, memories are non-linear, impressionistic, and frequently in need of explanatory footnotes. If the narrative line of Out of the Interior occasionally wavers, the reader is richly compensated with a series of vignettes that are moving, beautifully written, and, like dreams, sometimes startling in their clarity of vision. For Rhenisch, the act of remembrance also maintains a vital and healing link to the past: "[memories] spring out of the air before me, just where I thought they were all along, where I thought I had lost them, but with one crucial difference: they are alive. Daniel G. Payne, Western American Literature
FRIENDS TOLD me how good Harold Rhenisch's Out of the Interior (Cacanadada, $12.95) is, but I was leery. Rhenisch is a very good poet, and good poets don't often write good prose. But Out of the Interior is even better than I was told.
It isn't poetic &emdash; another common weakness of poets' prose &emdash; but this book about the Rhenisch family's life in the Interior's orchards is full of poetic vision, vitality and sensibility. Much of the book is an attempt to get inside the Interior landscape, both in the old sense and through the magic of imagination.
"In those days of old British Columbia, cut off from the world, cut off by horizons of stone and cottonwoods, mountain goats like spills of old lead paint rising and falling through colour like whitecaps on the sea, my father was out with his insect screen, tapping on the tree branches with a sawed-off broom handle."On a white piece of cotton torn out of a sheet and stretched over a foot-square wooden frame, he caught the insects that jarred off the branches: thrips, pamplamona, aphids, mites, spiders, and then knelt down in the grass to count them &emdash; to time his sprays. All around him the meadowlarks hollered through the air, from power poles or the top, soft tips of trees, anywhere high and thin and alone and wooden, to claim their space, yellow-breasted echoings across time."
In his prologue, Rhenisch suggests his father is the tragic figure in this book, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, he's up against it, but I'd say it's the author who's more tragic, an Odyssean figure trying to make it home. The elder Rhenisch is home; just like some Greek peasant who's married to the land, a Laertes who stays home to keep his eye on the farm. It's not untoward to speak in terms of Greek history. Rhenisch writes, "Even so, it may be well that these choices can be made by men and women of my parents' generation, while for us, their heirs, exiled by land-speculation and banished by the barriers of a foreign education, the choice of moving into direct perception of the physical world through the simple purchase of land is impossible." T here aren't many older themes in western literature.
But the book isn't only about the land. It's also about a boy growing up, how he learned to work and his relationship to work; it's bout his father and mother and their parents, about chemicals and apples, love and sex, the limits of art, and the Similkameen River. And it's just about the best thing to come out of the Okanagan in years. Charles Lillard, The Victoria Times-Colonist
Falling Through the Earth and Into the Sky
After studying Creative Writing at the University of Victoria in the 1970s, Harold Rhenisch ignored the trendy bars and cafes of the Lower Mainland and went back to the land, not as an idealistic hippie but as the hard-headed prodigal son of Okanagan German immigrant fruit farmers.
He doesn't need anyone to tell him it's the smartest thing he ever did.
On the strength of recent collections like A Delicate Fire and Dancing With My Daughter (both Sono Nis Press), he's been quietly emerging as one of the best poets in Canada ever to risk falling through the cracks. As a working farmer, he remains out-of-the-loop in the Interior, isolated from the literary sewing-circles of the Lower Mainland and lower Vancouver Island.
With a sensibility sharpened by the daily natural observation of living and working on the land and shaped by the transplanted European cultural traditions of his childhood, Rhenisch is a hardy hybrid. His ability to stand at the flashpoint where art and nature converge produces, inthe compact and compelling Out of the Interior prose that is almost Japanese in its intensity and austerity.
"Created thousands of years ago out of ritual and worship, farming is an art &emdash; its industrial face is only the metaphor of our time." Rhenisch writs. "In the end it is art, not economics, which provides the parameters of the farm, art which gave it to me an which draws me back to it again and again."
When poets turn to prose, too often it is only to prove they can write as badly as the rest of us. The initial queasiness that accompanies the sight of a three- or four-paragraph "prose poem" on a page is quickly dispelled here. Out of the Interior is a sequence of illuminations Rimbaud would envy for their lyricism and imagistic density, yet Rhenisch never loses his grip on the narrative chain that links each piece to the others.
As autobiography, Out of the Interior is a kind of masterpiece, an account of the formative experiences of a fine poet, ruthlessly edited of all the boring bits, shot through instead with the enhanced visions that are given to children and poets:
As a kid I often stared down the same way into the puddles of brown water that drained into the driveway from the sprinklers. There at my feet I saw clouds, miles below me, moving fast, in a high wind. I couldn't draw my eyes away, terrified that with one false step I would fall through the earth into the sky."
Out of the Interior also captures the essence of a vanishing Canadian experience: Rhenisch's German forbears were the last wave of immigrants who came seeking land in the spirit of pioneers (instead of looking for business opportunities in urban enclaves) and there is an elegaic note sounded here as poignant as the strains of O Canada sung in broken English at a small-town hockey game.
Even so, Rhenisch resists the temptation to sentimentalize. The portrait of his father is complex and subtly rendered, a reminder that a lot of people who survived the Second World War also "lost their lives" to it in a sense. Embittered, struggling to raise a family in a strange land, at war with the fruit co-op, Rhenisch Sr. seems driven to destroy himself by farming against all odds.
"With a possessed father trying to flee deep into the world, all I really had in the way of a childhood was the earth &emdash; wind streaming over my face and the scent of rain in dust; rain that for a moment returns dust to that first instant when it chipped off a crock face in a storm, the sharp scent of the earth, spinning in space, rain that gets in between the molecules of rock to shatter it yet farther, in re-creation of its original sundering: but I had nothing of human &emdash; commercial or political &emdash; worth."
Most of Harold Rhenisch's contemporaries got off the farm as fast and as far as they could, just as he went off to university. What make Rhenisch unique is his determination to return to that life, to accept his father's flawed legacy of seething, inarticulate rage and transmute it into work that is clear, wonderfully articulate and life-affirming.
"It is not the legacy or the land or the vision of life I would have chosen, but it is mine," he says, every bit as stubborn as his father.
"Make it new," was Ezra Pound's standing order to poets and Rhenisch has that very special gift of making those "usual old familiar words" jump up and dance, as if he'd just invented them.
In more than 200 pages of prose, there isn't a single cliche, trite image or shopworn phrase, or even a single sentence that doesn't bear the mark of long and careful thought.
When Michel de Montaigne invented the essai, it was the intellectual game of a bored aristocrat in retirement, pillaging classical authors for food for thought. Modern and postmodern writers have transformed it almost beyond recognition, but few have succeeded in working a magic as pure as this.
Rhenisch could have done safer things with this material. He could have written a passable coming-of-age first novel, or cynically squeezed two or three collections of poems out of it, applying for grants all the way. That he chose to do neither, to compress it all into meticulously crafted prose, demonstrates a high degree of self-confidence and self-criticism.
Harold Rhenisch now lives "in the sky" at 100 Mile House, where he is "revising" Pound's Cantos and working on a sequel to Out of the Interior. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun, 1993
In Rhenisch's hands, the episodic form Brautigan debased like a grifting panhandler, is transformed into a narrative technique Montaigne himself might envy. It's not light duty. John Moore. The Vancouver Sun, 2000
I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO CATEGORIZE WHAT HAROLD RHENISCH HAS DONE with his recent publication Out of the Interior. To begin simply, he is true to the title. He has dug deep within himself as child, adolescent and adult to write this lyrical account of&emdash;and here the matter clouds somewhat&emdash;himself growing up! his father growing inward! the family orchard growing away from any form of human control! Perhaps it's best described as symphonic writing because of its broad range, its subtleties and rhythms. Mood and imagery are composed from harsh clatter to gentle susurruations.
The bees feed on the sweet oozings of those flowers, and fertilize them. Out of the heavy wax frames and the scent of pine and shavings, we collect their honey-white-suited, with screens over our faces, and each movement slow and measured&emdash;but they drink it from the flowers with their whole being, out of the dancing, burning soil.
Of his father he writes: "He was simply burnt away by the sun and then caught up by the wind and driven before it."
The book defines a devotion to the wind and hard labour. It acknowledges drudgery, stupidity and blind obstinacy cheek by jowl with industriousness, majesty and perseverance. Pervading the work is a sense of defeat from men who have tried to eradicate their enemies with chemicals and machines. These are men who cannot live with "the totally random rhythms of despair and elation that are the life of a farm."
The subtitle The Lost Country refers to both new and old worlds. His ancestors left Germany after the Second World War and adopted the new west of British Columbia which could not sustain their longings. It is a country that sustained incongruity: his father sat on the porch listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, "the whole house booming so loudly ... that you could not stand inside." Rhenisch confronts war on two sides and in parallel--the war with Hitler and the war against Nature. He isn't heavy handed, and can sound almost delicate in describing the brutality:
Those were the years of wonders, years of uprooted apricots, old tires soaked in diesel oil and thrown under the shattered piles of trees to start them into fire, years of flame, a sun so thiI1 it filled the entire sky, right down to the surface of the soil. Through the columns of black diesel smoke that tore through the mounds of trees, choking with dust and ash and steam from the wet wood, it was a sun on fire. Those were the years the oxygen was burning out of the air. Where before there had been trees and grass and quiet, now there was dust and the desert stars, like welding arcs in the hull of a ship being built for war.
Exposing the calamity of spraying with poisons, Rhenisch doesn't assume a righteous tone. In essence the calamity is construed by the reader. Rhenisch supplies the details. He often plants a thought in one section, leaves off, and returns to complete it in another. This technique is extremely effective. It slows the reader down, and binds the whole together. The sections "Machines" and "Trinkets of Power" provide a good example. The first is more or less a catalogue of equipment on his father's farm. Sprayers, tractors, hammers, shovels and so forth are listed with poetic rhythm only to be followed in the next section by the opening line: "Machinery is the death of farming." He has lobbed a bright red Spartan at us and it has turned into a bomb. He continues:
It demands that the efficiency of the machine becomes the efficiency of the farm. With machines there is no entrance into the work-into the land: all you can enter is the machine itself.
Out of the interior is not a book easily put aside. It haunts me because it speaks to the "people who have genuinely and with deep feeling, given themselves to the earth." But who is listening? Those people are few, and dying out. The thread of defeat runs up the very seam of this book. In the following quote read farming for art, and definition for language:
Now the art remains, but art without an economy, a language of commerce between men, is of no value in the larger world where men do use that language.
Rhenisch doesn't explain away the death of agriculture, he describes it, and it is a painful collective loss. He has given us excellence of craft and a depth of understanding that I haven't come across in prose in a considerable length of time.
What we see when we actually touch the earth, in those places and moments when others have touched the earth before in that space, is all the world: there is no progression or progressive civilization of man and earth through time.
All the world is in this book. Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
Years of Wonder, Years of Uprooted Apricots Harold Rhenisch turns a poetic eye on home
POET Harold Rhenisch grew up among the fruit trees of the Okanagan. For anyone not familiar with the struggles of farmers, his or- chard-based autobiography will seem surprisingly brutal. Human flesh appears to be as delicate as the skin of an overripe peach, and the minds and hearts of farmers as vulnerable as the plants they tend. Out of the Interior: The Lost Country (Cacananadada) is not, however, a maudlin book, a vengeful or pedantic one. in fact, for all the pain, this portrait of a "lost country" is re- markably vital. Many contemporary writers reduce life to simple sets of good and evil, victim and victimiser, yes and no: Rhenisch's approach Is more complex. While he frequently distills his observations into images that can stand alone, none of them have to. His "years of wonders, years of uprooted apricots" are skillfuly connected to images in other eras, other lands and other minds. He never oversimplifies the world to make a point.
Wars run through this story of a son attempting to make peace with his heritage. Plants, pigs and farmers prosper or fail because of conflicts between nations, between species, generations, races and social classes. Nothing ever stays in place; something somewhere is always happening that will cause a change out in the dark fields some night.
Braided through the tales from Harold Rhenisch's own childhood are stories from his father's youth in Germany during the Second World War. The hungry child whose life became haunted by the sight of an American P-38 straflng a starving German cow immigrated to Canada. There he raised a son who grew up to write about a child who stood in the southern British Columbia desert and watched American jet fighters roar over the border. The pilots were practicing for duty in Vietnam. The elder farmer--the father-survived the bombs and hunger of World War II to become helplessly sick from toxic crop sprays decades later. Similar sprays also ruined the lives of soldiers who wielded them in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
During the Vietnam war years, farm supply catalogues that arrived at the Rhenisch orchard were often allied with the language of war, of farmer against aphid and mite and weed. Throughout this autobiography the farmers spray and spray and spray. "Spraying is the only action in his life my father has been able to repeat."
All of this effort did not, however, always protect farmers, their families, crops and land. The industry of leisure, with its vacation homes and golf courses, increasingly replaced the holdings of hard-working farmers. Rhenisch was forced to admit, "In the end the dreams and bone weary work do not count."
As I read about this transformation in the Okanagan, I kept being reminded of Ovid's 2,000-year-old Latin poem The Metamorphoses in which gods are forever turning mortals into rocks, constellations, birds, spiders, bats, pigs and trees. Whether the transformations prove to be a blessing or a curse all depends upon the god's purposes. When a man or woman cries out to a god for its protection, they cannot know what form that protection wiil take. Also, devotion to a god is no guarantee of a happy life; the faithful worshipper is just as likely to earn the vengeful envy of yet another god and have arms turned into branches and flngers turned into leaves.
Harold's father devoted himself to his fruit trees and they consumed him. His farm became a curse:
"Simply, my father, who had come from Germany to be free, could not stand farming. He needed earth, but farming left too much bile in his mouth. The desperation of it&emdash;and the culture of it&emdash;drove him to hate himself and fed his hatred of people and the world."
Harold's father confronted a landscape in much the way immigrant farmers confronted the beauty of the Canadian west over a half century before: they were often bent and broken by ice-laden winds at the same time that pastoral poets, back on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, were celebrating the healing beauty of the natural world.
For a bitter farmer's poet son, a failed farm became a blessing, a source of visions and inspiration. In the struggles and losses he discovered his art, as well as wisdom and compassion. He has begun to forgive his father's trespasses, and his own. The author found courage in the lost orchard as well: no exhausted settler and no pastoral poet would have dared to stand up and declare, as Harold Rhenisch does, "Gods can be as stupid as the wind, yet be full of fire and rain and the scent of powdered rock." If not the beginning of a brand new land-based mythology, Out Of The Interior is certainly a respectful refinement of Ovid's old one. Erting Etiis-Bastaad, Monday Magazine
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A Delicate Fire (1989)
Anyone opening A Delicate Fire at random will immediately recognize a poet who lives, works and writes close to the land. Harold Rhenisch has a farmer's keen weather-eye for the perpetual, minute, almost magical transformations that make up the natural world and a gift for coining images of intense immediacy. A cold winter in Rhenisch's world is moose antlers "like thoughts frozen/as soon as they hit the air" and wolves so "thin with hunger/they walked/right on the surface/of the snow".
But what gives Rhenisch's work its uncommon depth is the constant tension between the natural world and the world of words and ideas in which he is equally at home."The land as we hold it in words" he says, "is the land that words can hold,/but it is seen through loss/and not possession".
From the understated compressed stories of the He and She and This Land sections, through the playful witty anthropomorphisms of Coyote and Crow to the culminating Canto-like synthesis of The Koan, Rhenisch grafts intellect to intuition with the rigorous patience of a craftsman who finds the grain and works with it instead of just chopping wood. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun.
There is a great range to these poems -- narrative, descriptive, reflective, meditative -- and they speak with a naturally powerful voice, an authority many of the best poets do not achieve until halfway through their careers. George Woodcock B.C. Bookworld
Rhenisch consistently displays his most memorable, unique gifts...his long presence and work on the land weave eloquently and seamlessly with erudition, high discourse, and the central issue of language...With these poems, Rhenisch joins the company of such elegant writers as Robert Hass and Linda Gregg, Don Coles, Sharon Thesen and John Smith, even Thomas Merton, Richard Lemm Event
Eleusis (1985)
The Eleusinian mysteries, from which Rhenisch evidently takes his title, are the rites in celebration of Demeter and Persephone, the Greek deities of earth and the seasons. Rhenisch's poetry uses women and nature a great deal to create a world a little beyond the everyday, a place of feeling and idea and event in which humans are conected to the earth and the elements. A rhapsodical vision creates many of these poems; some are explicit allegories, as "Thursday Night," in which a poem comes walking up out of the tomato field and dumps itself on the poet's desk. A surreal quality reveals itself also in poem on memory: the bizarre and the fragmented qualities of a photograph album, mysterious and grotesque, are reduced and explained, yet also emphasized and expanded upon. This creates a disturbing sense of a life past and remote and still able, also, to trouble the present. Alan Thomas, Canadian Book Review Annual
Rhenisch's struggle is with the essentially ineffable, the essence of the visual epiphany, the immediacy of holistic vision, the sense of sensing the world in a grain of sand -- or, a leaf. His is the oldest of struggles. d.h.Sullivan Event 11/2
Here in Victoria, Sono Nis Press continues to introduce the work of three or four new or lesser-known pots each year. The best of their recent publications is a book by harold Rhenisch entitled Winter (Sono Nis Press, $5.95). This is an impressive debut by a young man who is just 24. Rhenisch's diction and a careful concern for form give his work both clarity and presence. It's sad to see a strong book such as Winter ignored; buried beneath the endless pile of mediocre, monotonous versifying that passes for Pietro and gets published in this country. One can only hope that, like cream, the best writing will eventually rise, to receive its due recognition. Doug Beardsley, The Victoria Times Colonist, 1982
Winter is Canadian poet Harold Rhenisch's first book. Like scores of other first books, Winter displays well-crafted, carefully controlled langauge. But Rhenisch's best poems convey his need to confront what he writes about, giving his work a sense of importance which is too often lacking in contemporary poetry. Winter is inventive, original, and enjoyable, but it sets itself apart from books which merely entertain by creatively addressing central human issues such as time, death, growth, and love.
Throughout the book, two impusles move the author -- a sensuous love for the land, and a restless intelligence. "Dream," the first poem, embodies both of these impjlses. The first stanza places the personal in contact with the land, the second stanza withdraws into an abstract consieration of memory, and the third unifies these two impulses through metaphor. Greg Glazner, Cutbbank 19
Harold Rhenisch, a young Canadian poet, reveals a deep concern for nature and the poet's place in nature in his ambitious first book, Winter. His is a struggle akin to Rilke's in the Duino Elegies, the struggle to find "something pure, contained,/narrow, human -- our own small strip of orchard/between river and rock." (Indeed, many of Rhenisch's poems take place in orchards.)
In "Dream" the introductory poem, Rhenisch stakes out the territory he will explore: (poem omitted) this poem is typical of the careful tending of language -- a particularity that aims beyond the particulars -- that is Rhenisch at his best. If poetry has any power above that of speech and prose, we see it when "words/extend until something other than words is left." Rhenisch admits this failure -- the inadequacy of words -- yet continues to speak and write, talking, like William Stafford or Philip Levine, carefully and passionately about the things he cares a great deal about, constantly straining to praise adequately that which must be praised, to say that which cannot quite be said.
At his best, Rhenisch recreates moments that resonate, scenes that have about them a feeling of ephipany.... But talking about such moments in such a vocab ulary is useless. I have enough faith in our atrophying collective unconscious to believe that everyone can feel the force behind these lines, whatever it is: (poem omitted) I guess we've seen "pastel light" often enough to wince, and we may detect the mildly displeasing scent of Pietro when the nighthawks "lace the sage with heat and air," but all of this is inconsequential -- when "the lake/soaks against hot sage," we are taken by the perfect match of sound to sense and by that something other than words that is left.
The sheer ambitiousness of this book yields some unnecessarily unique imagery, and, like any mystic -- and that's where Rhenisch's tendencies lead him, to mysticism -- he runs the danger of going it alone, leaving the reader to wish him well and draw back. A more sympathetic reader might understand when Rhenisch tell us "I am alone with the rush of my blood." perhaps rhenisch insists, as Whitman did, that "what I shall assume you shall assume also." The jury is still out on Whitman, but I for one feel more comfortable when Rhenisch speaks in the collective::
- None of us know love.
- We must begin again
- to ent er the world
- in every joy:
- these bushes leaping ut
- of light, conscious, blowing
- in the wind, can barely
- contain their shapes.
It is the difficult position of the mystic-poet that he often travels alone; perhaps that is why Rhenisch attempts two letter-poems. Robert hass, in a lecture delivered at the University of Montana several years ago, talked about the loneliness of the fist-person lyric. The lyric, he suggested, reinforces loneliness because it consists of the poet talking to himself. Hass mentioned the letter-poem as one possible solution to this problem. While it often seems that Rhenisch is revelling in his alone-ness, perhaps even nurturing it, reinforcing it, in many of these poems; and while there is no denying the power available to the poet in images discoverable only in solitude, it is good to remember that Bodhisattvas forgo enlightenment in order to save others, and that most Native American medicine men consult with the villagers after their vision-quests. Perhaps we can consider that the letter poems -- though they are not the most powerful poems in the book -- reveal a Rhenisch who is still prepared to "consult." Jon Davis, Raddle Moon #3 February 1986
Perhaps because they are newer to me, I found Theresa Kishkan and Harold Rhenisch my favorite poets in Skelton's collection. Kishkan has a good sense of poetic structure, one not betrayed by sloppy or trite endings. She is a more oracular poet than the others, more reminiscent of Susan Musgrave. she is most effective in the delicate Song for Ophelia, and in the primitive vision of Ice Age, or the fluid prose-poetry of River.
Harold Rhenisch, a young poet born in Penticton, is more devoted to a vision of actual landscapes, but she sees them through more tantalizing and resonant metaphors than an other poet in this collection. he is a poet who shrewdly travels to the ends of his metaphors, and is the real delight in this introduction to six lesser-known B.C. Poets. Vancouver Sun, May 22, 1981, Laurie Ricou
