Harold Rhenisch
A Delicate Fire
Sono Nis Press, 1989. ISBN: 1-55039-014-7 6 X 9 132 pp $8.95
Harold Rhenisch's poems are intensely gothic, sensual and profoundly perceptive. His thorough understanding of the natural world enables him to write both with precision and with an intuitive grasp of the forces beneath the surface. His portrayals of human relationships are subtle and he continues to meld together the profoundly philosophical and the wickedly funny. These poems have an enormous range and an impressive intellectual strength as well as emotional power. With this new collection, Rhenisch establishes himself as one of the leading Canadian poets of his generation." Robin Skelton
Reviews
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
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.
Sample PoemsEvelyn, B.C., 1949 The Drive Home From Calgary The Heartnuts The Dark We Will Not Be Read from The KoanEVELYN, B.C., 1949 When my mother was a girl she lived in the shadow of a glacier All summer the wind fell off the ice and into her In winter the moose would follow the cows into the barn at night there in the dark with the great wooden beams between them and the frozen light of the moon they would stamp fretfully In the cabin of rough-fitted logs behind the barn a young girl would toss in her sleep around her there was an inch of frost on the newspaper of the walls Sometimes a birch tree would explode nearby with the cold and she would startle awake When she walked to the main house in the morning in that dry winter air that tasted of steel her feet wrapped in newspaper inside her gumboots She would come in to the thin dark warmth of the kitchen Her mother was training her not to waste food and so served to her the boiled pig's lung she had choked on the night before and milk that tasted of cow's breath and greasy hair While outside her father was pulling open the great doors of the barn and the moose stepped out past him antlers held proudly above them like thoughts frozen as soon as they hit the air All the time there was not a breath of wind Only the cold slipping off the glacier and the wolves slipped through the shadows between the birch trees behind the house thin with hunger they walked right on the surface of the snow. Choose another sample THE DRIVE HOME FROM CALGARY A thriving agriculture: low hills, farms grubbed out between wind-swept trees&emdash; the whole plain empty, low to the ground. The sadness: Calgary rising from the delicate Bow River, without rising into the prairie of light. Across the mountains&emdash; slopes rich in delicate fire; Golden thrashing in its sleep of railyards and lumber. Revelstoke: dark, narrow strets, to shut out the sun&emdash; and the whole town smeared in a cheap image of antiquity&emdash; a stupid eighty years, no more&emdash; this is our power, all of it: pure and perfect farms, the soil stripped down to broken rock, on line; close to home, the broad open valley at Spallumcheen, settled for our children, reduced to ruin after only one hundred and twenty years, chopped upinto abandoned farms, wind-burnt houses, fallen fencelines, all untilled, weed-grown, all of it without grace of line&emdash; which is the British Columbia I know: an agriculture modelled on our urban lives, in turn modelled on the mind that knows men but not the earth&emdash; and then to ask us to live here as if this was the land&emdash;it is too much! Prostitution, aggression against no enemy but the self; Spallumcheen, baked hard and dry: all these years of compromise and indecision in the face of a brutal world add up to a senselessness our children cannot grasp&emdash;nor should they&emdash; we cannot grasp it ourselves&emdash; except in a sometimes almost imaginary resignation and acceptance. It's not purity we ask for after all&emdash;and not to have all the transitory images of a life meet in some meaningful definition&emdash; but to be able to live with our words&emdash; which means, in part, to faciliatate exchange between men, but does not mean profit, and does not mean to lie. As with my refusal to buy my way into this despair, each in their own way has succumbed&emdash; my grandfather, Socialist, to rage; my father, Capitalist, to rage: rage against family&emdash; which is the black frustration of fatigue: it is the denial of the self past endurance; the self so wearied by the fight to come, clear of debt, into the land, that it cannot&emdash; not when the world is approachable through laziness, wherein we catch oruselves&emdash;or the world&emdash; for even one moment alone&emdash; but not through effort: not a lesson that is easily learned or lived, and it needn't be&emdash; there are some words that have no completion&emdash; a process and not a static point of arrival, a chosen hour that can be grasped and held out in neither warning nor priase: such as the promise to give our childrne even one moment alone with the air. Choose another sample THE HEARTNUTS Today I walked through the orchard, a few apples left on the branches, glowing in the white air, to dig wlanuts fro the planking laid down beside the shed; and scooped the nuts from under the leaves&emdash;and knocked the black-husked nuts off the bare, ash-smudged branches with my shovel. But mostly I dug the heartnuts from under the trees in the orchard. Their roots are black, thickest at the point where stalk meets root&emdash;nuts so hard the jays can't carack them, screaming above the gravel cut, proud&emdash; split by frost, they grow under the tres&emdash;weeds. I gather them into sacks in the driving snow. The branches fill the air like people watching softly. There are no leaves. All fall, I've watched the earth shift through colour&emdash; apples flooding into the bins, the grass like slugs&emdash;and it did feel like movement. Now I walk back to the car, huge flakes, a full inch across, filing theair before me with purity, and know that God is not the question. I have plowed a field of grass for these trees&emdash;to make a living, and have other questions: the black roots of the heartnuts, lightning, snowflakes catching in the fine feeder roots as I pull them up through old leves and carry them, hanging down from my arms. Ice has been forming around the banks of the river for a week now, and now snow, blue, in the light of a sun that can only make it through today as snow. The trees slowly begin to carry their own weight of cold. I walk through snow, a steady snow without wind, or stars&emdash;they're high overhead&emdash; I have to imagine their blackness and their burning&emdash;this is a day of the earth: black roots carried through the snow: black roots, much larger than the branches, feeding. Choose another sample THE DARK The sheep stare into the night The grease of their wool and the dust of the hay that they tread underfoot deepens the air this is the night that the Dark pounds at the door but is not heard He leans on an old wooden staff He beats the door with its butt and the whole house booms and shakes but no one hers the baby wakes up startled and hears the sheep shifting restless and hears the grass and the cold stars She lies awake for half an hour nothing in her mind but the scent of hay how it fills the head with sunlight until the hands can see slowly she drifts back asleep for she is tired and the world is full of dreams And again the Dark beats at the door Choose another sample WE WILL NOT BE READ Pines, pouring over K-mountain: drinking my wasted breath they distil a cold night air: blue-grey, hanging oiek smoke above the peeling roofs of Keremeos. Fall: dead grass, the sweaty ripeness of seed. We will not be read: Whitman, Pound, Blake, were unread in their time. This is the land of the dead then :the light that has fallen through the earth and thus has been transformed into earth whre earth is indivisible from its shadow of light. And women: too a hard learning. :not in a self-mocking slur against their luminous worth&emdash; or mouth&emdash;from which the light pours&emdash; for so is their body&emdash; but in just its opposite attraction they do not yield to power. It is with them we must learn to live&emdash; if we are to be read&emdash; not in the cool (already possessed by us) light of memory, but in the thick light of fall flat fields of ochre grass, blue clouds of stone, rain, a landscape so rich in colour it is only these opposing and complementary planes&emdash; not of light, but presence &emdash;defining as they do the ocean of the air. We are not being read. There is no drawing forth from ourselves of asters and snapdragons, richer in colour because of their drought. So is the wealth of our women squandered, in all our small towns of retreat. Our women live in our houses&emdash; who are they if not our voices? Bty placing all our faith in poems, unread&emdash;you think by accident?&emdash; we render ourselves speechless [ ] Compare: a poem, in the moment of its waking as it enters this fall air: aster, chrysanthemum: flowers of an almost human beauty, opening from outside of the world: may this be alien to our children, something too simple to require speech the wind sings in the falsetto of granite; crows rise like mildew from parched fields Clouds: white as the reflections of light and shade on water the colour of sky and the taste of stone&emdash; thicker than the sky, thinner than stone &emdash;pour over us, but without judgement: essences. We are presences, men standing in the alley back of main-street, in the smell of oil and dirt, the chafed leather of our boots scuffing through bolts and knapweed&emdash; the sediment of the sky&emdash;what all that blue, all that water, tha air without a thought of colour and so the very definition of colour, comes to&emdash; :with no conversation between friends, the intelligence destroyed, the loss of worth; there is no language: here bright men speak only of farms, with no brightness of perception&emdash; even though they have been out and have seen&emdash; for who hasn't seen in the thin light off the sea the amount of light we can destroy in our frustration: Vancouver rising from the Gulf of Georgia like a chrysanthemum, pale. We will be unread: as the granite sings the unwavering notes of its despair and darkness rises up sudden as fire through the bunchgrass, we will be forgotten and unread by all that matters in time: the transient, the ephemeral, the peaches ripe only for a day, then swarming with wasps; and all these years will escape us: ours is the past and future, what we cannot live: it is not for us to draw time from the river and drink it from our hands&emdash;from our words&emdash; it is ours to pass on, unharmed&emdash; it is ours to praise knapweed, we who have lived so long with distrust we accept civilization as a judgement. But so is the air. So is the light weaving with shadow over the face of mountain water collapsing like grass before the wind&emdash; it is only these words that care for us, and praise us. And they are in our care. Choose another sample from THE KOAN The filbert bush along my fence blossoms all witner and gives fruit, which when dried and crackedc can be eaten to give the taste of the wood, the blindness within the root of the filbert, the black lone-ness of the soil; the apple, when plucked from a black, wet limb three days after the first hard frost that has withered the tomatoes into their blight, and cupped with the blossom end to the fingers in the palm of a man's two hands, can be cracked in half to bring to light flesh that has not before seen light, which is white, unblemished, and there within, in a star-shaped, fibrous tissue which is the womb of this tree, a few brown and bitter seeds: so too is the mind not only a flower that can open and so provide a small bowl for light, said Chuang Tzu after a lifetime of concentration on concentration, but is also a seed, a flower that closes upon itself and, old and brittle, its petals withered and scattered, loses all shape of itself, so forming a kernel that can crack the teeth. The painter grows into his craft: he spends a lifetime above the lake, and so over time learns or rather re-learns&emdash; light, as it pours down over the hills and lights even the depths of the lake: yet it is not the mind that burns within his canvas, illuminating it, but the thick residue of those years of the sun pouring over his face: he is like a block of wood set aflame: by concentrating the light through the forms of his art, he so intensifies it that he is burnt away: there is no kernel, no completion. Similarly, it is not a useless acticvity to page through books to find the breath of living men, for you will soon find&emdash;yoor eyes going black with the realization&emdash;that it is a useless activity: it is better to go out and stand in the flood-raked, snapped-off stalks of sand-bar willow below the abandoned bridge of the Great Northern Railroad over the mercury shadow of the Similkameen River in the wind, your jacket snapping about you, the whole earth in motion, and clouds dissipating, in the force of the wind, directly into sky: it is a great industrial construction above you and blocks out the better part of the sky, but it is there: it is best, as Kung said, to do something in particular. The prophets of Greece before the invention of writing, claimed to have had, while sleeping, their ears licked out by snakes, and so were able to hear the speech of birds; the koan sets before you a purpose and the means to achieve that purpose, whereas the purpose itself is to have no purpose, and to strive to no end, but to be a receptacle, and so forces the mind to snap, and if there is no kernel there, it is because it is the world. Choose another sample
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