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Harold Rhenisch Eleusis |
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Sono Nis Press, 1985. ISBN: 0-9192 03-84-1 6 X9 104 pp $6.95
In this collection, Rhenisch explores a variety of ancient metaphysical conceptions and makes them new. From Neo-Platonism to Gnosticism, from the irreverence of Coyote to Pound's Manicheanist visions, from Shamanism to Bacchic reveries, Rhenisch explores the interface between the self, land, memory, and contemporary social life in the abandoned town of Hedley, which could be any poor, discarded town in Canada, in exquisitely-crafted, haunting poems of rich music and bright imagery.
Review
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
Sample PoemsSecond Song for the Moon Third Song for the Moon March Apples from MLSSECOND SONG FOR THE MOON The ocean rolls against my shore, a grey pool of light. Days push through to me across the water, low flying birds, storm: gulls rise up before me, thin white flecks of earth, screaming out of the light. They are ash, anger. If night were to come to me out of water and if she were to hold her breath and say I am death, I am darkness , I could shrug now, and say yes, I know, we have drowned long ago, there are only dreams, this earth that ripples and sways beneath our feet&emdash; but what use is this language now we are swimming where dreams have come clear in light? Of light I know nothing except it is twin of darkness and is also pain. The point at which we could still turn back is gone and the way back is lost; all time is now: of clarity I know nothing. I don't live in memory: I want to hold my thought down to one thing but cannot: it blows up around me&emdash; a world I would have never dreamed: it has dreamed itself out of nothing and hovers over that first thought like a gull over grey waves, its wings folding night, a swirl of sea. Dark shapes rise out of the salt into streaming air, as still as hope&emdash; and with the same bewilderment; I cannot hold them to any form, except the power deep within them, flowing around them, such as the earth enclosing a man's heart with her body. Only in the light are we men: we don't know the dogs that howl in our bones, restless under the moon, the moon scattering them like leaves, across its seething flesh, this swaying, love-sick body. Choose another sample THIRD SONG FOR THE MOON Along with us trees are fire, reflections of the sun in a dark pool. The branches this deep in the world grow dark as rain. I crouch on the stone bar of the river that will always run in my memory; I roll white water off my fingers: a tree stands tall in my day, as black as thought&emdash; this is a terrible god we have found, that pushes us farther into light, not as if in joy, but as if in rage. Around me the trees tremble; they are unable to sleep. They watch me in terror&emdash; and I hope for love! While we've been busy singing to our selves and all our dead, time has been growing thin in feeding us. Here in this cool spring, lost in my sleep, a thin, fleshless flame, it aches to speak; it shouts out the crash of waves on sand, it beats the sand down, reaching at the feet of the man who walks at its lips, crashes down, leaps for him, foam. The man walks on alone. The sea bellows at the shore. Choose another sample MARCH APPLES A few wrinkled, shrunken apples, their flesh gone yellow, in a corner of a rootcellar in the spring, the straw gone soft beneath them, gathered home with the first light after the cold&emdash; and even that a memory&emdash;to warm a spring throat, the bulbs already blooming, the morning wind scattering the ash off yesterday's pruning piles into small tongues of fire. Choose another sample from MLS The principal of the school walks up to the ballpark with his son, to watch it crumble. The trees brush at the sky then shudder in a long slow scream and drop their leaves in a cough of snow. I sit across a square wooden table from this man who says he'll quit, do I feel the same about this town as he does? To hell with that: I stare from rock and from the light, at a foetal fawn at the dump in August, and his turning back, at what I've never known myself to know: there is a rightness to the way time splits our deaths and lives in equal portions across memory and denial to give us away into low fog and melting snowfall, a clatter of rock crashing off the cliff, the air swimming so brightly with fire and smoke we can't stand up but have to lie down on the couches and beat our women senseless. I clump down the wide stairway, empty, and the stairs empty. Fifty kids can't begin to fill this school. I turn on the lights in front and off behind me, a slow blinking progress down from room to room, looking for something here that can speak. It doesn't speak. This is what I thought I could begin with: a silver furnace, filling a high bare room with its low flickering tongue, set deep in a concrete pit in the floor, a blue steel railing, the paint chipped and overcoated, set in the concrete around it. A low flicker of flame shines through the gratings. When the school first opened, the children had to stoke it with coal. It runs on oil now. It eats away at the cold. Choose another sample
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©Harold Rhenisch, 2002. All rights reserved.
Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>
