Harold Rhenisch
Taking the Breath Away
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Harold Rhenisch Taking the Breath Away |
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Ronsdale Press, February 1998. ISBN: 0-921870-55-8 6 x 9 90 pp $13.95
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 LakeGUIDE 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.
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.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.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, 1999. All rights reserved.
Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@w.net>
