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Harold Rhenisch

Taking the Breath Away

Ronsdale Press, February 1998.  ISBN: 0-921870-55-8  6 x 9  90 pp  $13.95

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 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.


Reviews

"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

 


Sample Poems

 

Guide to Canadian Architecture
      A Layman's Guide to Literary Criticism
      The City Without Angels
      The Night Lake
       
GUIDE TO CANADIAN ARCHITECTURE
          
		Just what the hell is a nature poem...?
							Kroetsch
          
 
 
The walls here hold up the roof,
which holds up the sky.
 
To understand the necessary physics:
drink a tree right out of your hands,
whisper a spider with your heels.
 
Not all houses can be beautiful,
because not all men
 
have suffered Robert Kroetsch & Co., Movers,
 
to deconstruct their house,
 
but there! there! it's gonna be alright,
 
the stars will appear
through the mosquito light
and the wind will suck at the grass stems
with its teeth.
 
I promise.
 
Look, when the government
pushed down Hans Feldt's
orchard house in Naramata,
 
after having relocated him
to the Haven Hill Retirement Centre in Penticton,
 
 
the house exploded in a cloud of bats
when the Cat touched the first wall,
 
right in front of the waiting trucks.
 
But he came back. A ghost, sure,
yet he lived with me for the whole summer,
 
as I spat out apricots between my fingers
into the grass, on those white cliffs
above the lake;
 
giving me the sky,
as a gift,
 
and the earth as a chain.
 
I'd read Virgil, outside,
under the pear trees,
 
until the light was so thin
the words were only the sound of the wind
in the stiff leaves,
 
and the bull snake
slipped through the grass&emdash;
 
a fire that gave off no light.
 
When you build a house,
build it by hand,
 
with some idea of the people
who will live there
 
with all their children.
          

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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.
          
 

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         THE CITY WITHOUT ANGELS
          
		Freiburg im Breisgau
          
 
 
 
Long ago the angels lived in doorways.
Whenever people went in and out,
the angels had to step into the streets.
If it had snowed they were terribly cold:
all they had for shoes were sandals
woven out of reeds.
 
In that old city people had built shelters 
for themselves and for their livestock;
they had built nothing for the holy birds. 
Whenever it rained and the wind blew out of the west,
the angels sought refuge in the cathedral,
 
but the cathedral was built of stone: high, dark, 
and cold. It held only a few low wooden pews, 
without pillows, without blankets. The angels 
would lay themselves out there head to head
and stare the whole night
thoughtfully at the dark stone sky.
 
On Sundays it was even worse: 
the people streamed from the narrow alleys
into the cathedral. There was no room left for the angels:
they had to stand outside in the square&emdash;
in the hot sunlight, in the snow,
and in the black rain of the world.
 
 
In the nave the choir sang as beautifully as the boys
who sat on the knees of God and ate grapes out of his hands,
but in the square the angels watched the monsters
on the peak of the roof, listened to the hymns, and did not 
sing a note, and said no word. They simply 
waited until the people were finished.
They had blue faces. They were half frozen.
You see them now and think they are made out of stone.
They stand in gaps in the wall
and on the roof, solid, yet they are not made out of stone.
They are made out of the song of the choir
and the red mouths of women.
 
They are waiting for us.
They know very well that they must wait 
a long, long time. They have prepared themselves 
for that. They have transformed themselves from ambassadors
into Waiting itself, while a black rain falls
in the night of the cities
and the doors in the empty gaps of the wall
are newly-painted and tightly closed.
          
 

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         THE NIGHT LAKE
          
 
 
 
At night the lake disappears
I walk down the mud slopes
while the fish rise
and fly through the air around me
blue and yellow and red
in swarms and flocks
the minnows like grasshoppers
the large fish like eagles and crows
 
There in the very deepest pools
I swim through the air
for a few hours
One by one the stars wink out
far overhead
as the light
begins to wash in blue
from the horizon
 
It settles around my feet
cool
and I know I must begin
again the long climb
out to the shore
where the reeds rustle
and the sopranos of the red dock
sing
 
And the fish know
they must slowly sink down
into the daytime pool
of their memory
 
 
When I climb out through the mud
I hear the fish behind me
one at a time
splash down
into the water
 
In the early morning
as I stand among the reeds
the green surface of the lake
stretches out before me
and the trout rise up to it
with their lips
and break
it
 
and every
touch of their mouths is
a drop of rain

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©Harold Rhenisch, 2002

Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>