Harold Rhenisch

Works in Progress

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Here are some of the books Harold Rhenisch is working on right now. To read more, click on a title, or scroll down to browse them all.

The Wolves at Evelyn (forthcoming from Brindle and Glass, September 2005)
A Palette of Birds (forthcoming from Brindle and Glass, February 2006)
Return to Open Water: Selected and New Poems 1978-2005
Time Enough
A Poet in British British Columbia
The Anatomy of a Play
The Faust Book
Letters for a Young Poet
The Similkameen Elegies
Dear Will
Lost Works

A Palette of Birds

This is a bird-watching book with a difference: witty,intimate, often hilarious, this is the story of learning wildness through observing birds in the cycle of the seasons on a lake on the Central Plateau.

I watched birds every day for ten years from the shore of 108 Lake. This is their story.

 

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Time Enough

An homage to Robin Skelton.

Robin Skelton died in 1997. Written in 2002, these poems are a conversation with him through the screen of his poetry, expanding his concept of poetry as a living screen between writer and reader, and a chance to sit down with him again for a glass of whiskey and some good, clear talk.
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The Wolves at Evelyn

My grandparents came to the Okanagan Valley in 1929, from Breslau, Silesia. My great grandmother fled the Russians as they advanced into Germany in 1945. My mother was raised in the impoverished immigrant communities squeezed into the bush around the edges of the Fraser Valley, and under the Hudson's Bay Glacier in Evelyn, B.C. This is their story, the story of my cousin, Hans, broken by the railroad, famed across Canada as "the laziest man on the trains," and the conflict between the dreams and reality of a cast of other Germans, young and old, in Canada and the Old World. It is a story of colonialism, Eden, Utopian visions, and of re-imagining Canada.

The Okanagan of my childhood was simultaneously an English colony and a German country.

 
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The Similkameen Elegies

A hymn to a land loved and lost.

An elegy for lost British Columbia, inspired by Charles Lillard's Rivers Were Promises. It is a a revisitiation in contemporary dress of Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. The ancient, gnostic theme of the estrangement of humankind from its true self, expressed through the neo-platonic philosophy of Porphyry, is in this book returned to the earth. Behind the screens of Thomas Taylor's 200 year old translation, and the screens of Iamblichus laying an ancient Egyptian conception of the cosmos into the foundations of medieval rhetoric, lies a world of intense beauty. The loss of this world has led to much of the falsehood and ugliness of the modern world. In these poems, built out of clarity and colloquial speech, that ancient, unified cosmos is purified, and the bureaucratic aspirations of both Thomas Taylor, translator, and Iamblichus, rhetoretician, are laid to rest.
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The Faust Book

From the drowning mountains above Salzburg, infested by devils, to the castle of the Archbishop and the court of Mad King Ludwig, to the gold mines of the Cariboo and Judge Mathew Bailie Begbie, this is a book of transformations, oppression, and a fight for freedom, told in a joyful style, that led directly to Free Will.

The tricksters are back.

 

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Return to Open Water

New and Selected Poems: 1978-2005

One of the curiousities of the Canadian publishing industry, is that books can lie in obscurity for years. Distribution is haphazard and the chance of a poet from one side of the country knowing the poems of a poet on the other side of the country are haphazard at best. I've balanced this frustration over the years by touring the country giving readings, but as time has gone on, I've been lugging a larger and larger pile of books up to the mic, just so I could read my favourites, show progressions, and show the narrative of the poems opening into a present woven of many strands. This book is going to save my back and hopefully bring some of my lost poems to my readers.
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Harold at Work on a New Book

A Poet in British British Columbia

Ranging from the poetry wars of the 1970s to the Vancouver Folk Festival in 1984, from new interpretations of Rilke and Celan, explorations of Shakespeare's dabbling in alchemy, the tarot, Ezra Pound, Pat Lane, Charles Lillard, Al Purdy, J.M. Yates, this book presents a theory of poetry of the last two generations as a Cold War struggle lying at the heart of an understanding of our time. This is a personal book, though -- lyrical and centred in people and place. As I've toured the province reading and teaching poetry, time and again I have come across writers who are still shell-shocked, twenty-five years later, from writing classes they took in B.C.'s poetry wars. This book is for them.

A poet's journey, a Malte Laurid's Brigge for our time. This is my first non-fiction book focussing on the art I love, rather than the land and people I, yes, love.

 
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Letters for a Young Poet

Eunoia for lovers.

Christian Bök's Eunoia was a publishing sensation: 5 chapters, one for each vowel, with the limitation that the words in each chapter could contain only the vowel represented by that chapter. Well, that's the diving board. Here are the consonants, bravely advising young poets led into romance by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, in a series of midnight trysts in baroque gardens, formal dances with Anna Karenina, and sonorous exuberance. These are poems to be read aloud.
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Lost Works

Fifteen years of immersion in William Carlos' Williams Pictures from Brueghel inspired me to lay down my poems as scripts for the spoken voice. The result was an open, colloquial style which led to all my books after 1985, and which was suppressed by an editor. When I received the manuscripts back, mildewed, and sealed in a rusty metal box, in 2000, I realized that that editor had been wrong. These poems lift off of the page.

Two lost manuscripts of open field verse lost in the creation of A Delicate Fire, returned after fifteen years.

 
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The Anatomy of a Play

The story of a crazy experiment in community theatre.

While the armed standoff was going down at Gustafson Lake, a bunch of us living in 100 Mile House got together to start a community theatre. I wanted to do Romeo and Juliet as a conflict between the RCMP and the Secwepemc. Others wanted to do a murder mystery, or maybe some dinner theatre. What we got instead was a performance of an epic creation story from the Ainu People of Hokkaido, set against the bombing of Hiroshima, which included miners' lamps, old computers scrolling in green glow, multi-track taped recordings, and Ainu chants, in one crazed performance in an old dormitory painted black and full of pillars. Here is the story of a community off the grid, told with affection.

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Dear Will

Shakespeare's sonnets were intended to make him and his lovers live forever.They have the haunting subtext of a love affair with a young boy. In Living Will, I freed Shakespeare from the cage of the poems, so he could live again. In Dear Will I complete the circle. Here the boy lives, dwarfing Shakespeare in his appetite for life.

Cynical, naive, caustic, wild, Shakespeare's boy tells his story from the modelling studios, stages, and back streets.

 

 

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