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Spring, 1982 photo by Robert Chatfield |
Harold Rhenisch What the Critics Say |
Fall, 1998 photo by Diane Rhenisch |
On this page you will find 13 reviews of 5 books by Harold Rhenisch. To read a review, just click on the title below, or scroll down to browse all the reviews.
Taking the Breath Away (4 reviews)
Taking the Breath Away (1998)
4 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
his new collection of poems Taking the Breath Away Harold
Rhenisch reveals the pioneering poetic line that will usher us into
the 21st century. His is a poetry that touches lightly on many
styles, plays with "isms," and then skips forward into fresh new
insights. These are poems that transform themselves continually,
evoking the feeling that anything might happen, that the future
continually leaps free of the present. Known as the poet of the land,
Rhenisch enacts in many of these new works the rural rhythms of the
Cariboo, the high volcanic plateau between the mighty Eraser and
Thompson rivers where he makes his home. The echo of the loons, a
horse standing alone in a pasture of thistles, the silent shapes of
fish gliding beneath the ice &emdash; all these reveal the alchemy of
this ancient land. Yet Rhenisch is equally at ease in the cities of
Europe, reflecting on why it was the burghers built no shelters for
the angels, only dark, cold and windy cathedrals. Whether it is out
on the Canadian ranch land or inside the Dom at Freiburg, Rhenisch
enables us to hear an ancient voice from beyond the urban grid, a
voice that calls us home into an endlessly changing
present. Ronald B.
Hatch
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
Dancing With My Daughter (1993)
Two Reviews
Drifting
north from the Similkameen to the Cariboo, Rhenisch is a kind of
Steppenwolf who manages to combine both the populism of wanna-be work
poets and the subtleties of "poets' poet." The orchardist and the
haiku poet both believe in the value of pruning, and there is a
farmer's economy of effort which lends emotional and intellectual
incandescence to very line Rhenisch writes. Reading him always makes
you feel as though you're sitting at a farmhouse kitchen table late
at night with a stack of books and a glass of something from the
cellar, kids and stock safely abed, and an hour or two to talk
quietly about what it all means. John
Moore, The Vancouver Sun
HAROLD
RHENISCH WRITES INTENSELY LYRICAL POETRY. Breath and rhythm become
modifiers for imagery.
The colour of the grass this morning, the wind has dissipated into a stillness. Like the clouds-lifting off the scree in September, the valley air full of the cider of apple harvest, draining the breath out of a man's thoughts in the morning, in clouds-
He takes three and a half lines to complete the rhyme of "stillness" with "harvest" but the lyric is thus created and made intricate by the parallel images of colourless grass, dissipated wind and breathless thoughts sur- rounding the rhyme. This is poetry with the complex bouquet of a fine wine, redolent of what the wine contains, but also of what once contained the wine.
Wind rushing across the field like a cloak swirled around the shoulders in anger
is a concrete metaphor, but a metaphor in motion-not a stockstill object on view in a display case. These days few poets attempt such serious lyric-making. Too often it's cut on cynicism or a distancing skepticism. Besides, lyricism can be a house of cards. Rhenisch proves this contention in a few poems when he allows the poetic language to get the better of the poem. For example in "Fyn"-a love poem which isn't much of a love poem-he diddles about with the odour of a colour ("the odour / of a pale blue light") far too long. The sensuality of odour is all but lost as the poet searches for the possibility of it as a connecting image. Yet for every failure he has an amplitude of success, and if I admire his lyricism I enthuse over his simplicity. "There is no wealth / but what we draw from this soil" and "... the small altars / of household need" are two examples of the concision which contrasts his lyricism. In fact this marriage of starkness and ornament culminates in the most pleasurable poem in the volume: "The Pear Boxes." It is a lengthy ruminative poem that travels back in time with object (the pear boxes), sallies forth with idea ("a form of fire"), and sets us down finally in the present:
I am tearing the broken ones to shreds-the wood is now too soft and will hold no new nails; they have come this far, ... to become again ... kindling for the winter.
Rhenisch puts the whole of the poem down so carefully on paper that it becomes a wonder. Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
5 Reviews
In
the promotional material for Out of the Interior: The Lost Country,
the publisher proclaims that in this work Harold Rhenisch has
succeeded in "extending the forms of autobiography." This work not
only lives up to its billing, but may even exceed it. Rhenisch's
memoir of growing up on his family's farm in the Okanagan region of
British Columbia is a fascinating portrayal of the immigrant
experience in North America, and a perceptive commentary on the
misguided ways in which humans have tried to control the
land.
Rhenisch's memories of his family's farm are closely tied to those of his father, a German immigrant. Like John Muir, who wrote about life on his father's Wisconsin farm over a century ago, Rhenisch learns that the confrontational stance towards the land, a stance that his father brought with him from the old world, is a self-defeating one: "over and over again my father was being taught a lesson, but he did not realize it until it was too late and he had lost even the land he loved." His father's hands &emdash; restlessly grasping &emdash; are a symbol of his approach to farming, as was his futile attempt to keep nature at bay by saturating the farm with lethal pesticides that poison the sprayers as well as the sprayed. Despite the family's efforts, the farm was only a marginal proposition economically, and when it failed it took the family with it: "From that moment on, we were never a family again. The farm was all we had."
Piecing together the diffuse and often opaque images that our memories are comprised of is not the tidy, chronological process that is suggested by most autobiographical writing. Like dimly recalled dreams, memories are non-linear, impressionistic, and frequently in need of explanatory footnotes. If the narrative line of Out of the Interior occasionally wavers, the reader is richly compensated with a series of vignettes that are moving, beautifully written, and, like dreams, sometimes startling in their clarity of vision. For Rhenisch, the act of remembrance also maintains a vital and healing link to the past: "[memories] spring out of the air before me, just where I thought they were all along, where I thought I had lost them, but with one crucial difference: they are alive. Daniel G. Payne, Western American Literature Back to Top
FRIENDS
TOLD me how good Harold Rhenisch's Out of the Interior
(Cacanadada, $12.95) is, but I was leery. Rhenisch is a very good
poet, and good poets don't often write good prose. But Out of the
Interior is even better than I was told.
It isn't poetic &emdash; another common weakness of poets' prose &emdash; but this book about the Rhenisch family's life in the Interior's orchards is full of poetic vision, vitality and sensibility. Much of the book is an attempt to get inside the Interior landscape, both in the old sense and through the magic of imagination.
"In those days of old British Columbia, cut off from the world, cut off by horizons of stone and cottonwoods, mountain goats like spills of old lead paint rising and falling through colour like whitecaps on the sea, my father was out with his insect screen, tapping on the tree branches with a sawed-off broom handle."On a white piece of cotton torn out of a sheet and stretched over a foot-square wooden frame, he caught the insects that jarred off the branches: thrips, pamplamona, aphids, mites, spiders, and then knelt down in the grass to count them &emdash; to time his sprays. All around him the meadowlarks hollered through the air, from power poles or the top, soft tips of trees, anywhere high and thin and alone and wooden, to claim their space, yellow-breasted echoings across time."
In his prologue, Rhenisch suggests his father is the tragic figure in this book, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, he's up against it, but I'd say it's the author who's more tragic, an Odyssean figure trying to make it home. The elder Rhenisch is home; just like some Greek peasant who's married to the land, a Laertes who stays home to keep his eye on the farm. It's not untoward to speak in terms of Greek history. Rhenisch writes, "Even so, it may be well that these choices can be made by men and women of my parents' generation, while for us, their heirs, exiled by land-speculation and banished by the barriers of a foreign education, the choice of moving into direct perception of the physical world through the simple purchase of land is impossible." T here aren't many older themes in western literature.
But the book isn't only about the land. It's also about a boy growing up, how he learned to work and his relationship to work; it's bout his father and mother and their parents, about chemicals and apples, love and sex, the limits of art, and the Similkameen River. And it's just about the best thing to come out of the Okanagan in years. Charles Lillard, The Victoria Times-Colonist Back to Top
Falling Through the Earth and Into the Sky
After
studying Creative Writing at the University of Victoria in the 1970s,
Harold Rhenisch ignored the trendy bars and cafes of the Lower
Mainland and went back to the land, not as an idealistic hippie but
as the hard-headed prodigal son of Okanagan German immigrant fruit
farmers.
He doesn't need anyone to tell him it's the smartest thing he ever did.
On the strength of recent collections like A Delicate Fire and Dancing With My Daughter (both Sono Nis Press), he's been quietly emerging as one of the best poets in Canada ever to risk falling through the cracks. As a working farmer, he remains out-of-the-loop in the Interior, isolated from the literary sewing-circles of the Lower Mainland and lower Vancouver Island.
With a sensibility sharpened by the daily natural observation of living and working on the land and shaped by the transplanted European cultural traditions of his childhood, Rhenisch is a hardy hybrid. His ability to stand at the flashpoint where art and nature converge produces, inthe compact and compelling Out of the Interior prose that is almost Japanese in its intensity and austerity.
"Created thousands of years ago out of ritual and worship, farming is an art &emdash; its industrial face is only the metaphor of our time." Rhenisch writs. "In the end it is art, not economics, which provides the parameters of the farm, art which gave it to me an which draws me back to it again and again."
When poets turn to prose, too often it is only to prove they can write as badly as the rest of us. The initial queasiness that accompanies the sight of a three- or four-paragraph "prose poem" on a page is quickly dispelled here. Out of the Interior is a sequence of illuminations Rimbaud would envy for their lyricism and imagistic density, yet Rhenisch never loses his grip on the narrative chain that links each piece to the others.
As autobiography, Out of the Interior is a kind of masterpiece, an account of the formative experiences of a fine poet, ruthlessly edited of all the boring bits, shot through instead with the enhanced visions that are given to children and poets:
As a kid I often stared down the same way into the puddles of brown water that drained into the driveway from the sprinklers. There at my feet I saw clouds, miles below me, moving fast, in a high wind. I couldn't draw my eyes away, terrified that with one false step I would fall through the earth into the sky."
Out of the Interior also captures the essence of a vanishing Canadian experience: Rhenisch's German forbears were the last wave of immigrants who came seeking land in the spirit of pioneers (instead of looking for business opportunities in urban enclaves) and there is an elegaic note sounded here as poignant as the strains of O Canada sung in broken English at a small-town hockey game.
Even so, Rhenisch resists the temptation to sentimentalize. The portrait of his father is complex and subtly rendered, a reminder that a lot of people who survived the Second World War also "lost their lives" to it in a sense. Embittered, struggling to raise a family in a strange land, at war with the fruit co-op, Rhenisch Sr. seems driven to destroy himself by farming against all odds.
"With a possessed father trying to flee deep into the world, all I really had in the way of a childhood was the earth &emdash; wind streaming over my face and the scent of rain in dust; rain that for a moment returns dust to that first instant when it chipped off a crock face in a storm, the sharp scent of the earth, spinning in space, rain that gets in between the molecules of rock to shatter it yet farther, in re-creation of its original sundering: but I had nothing of human &emdash; commercial or political &emdash; worth."
Most of Harold Rhenisch's contemporaries got off the farm as fast and as far as they could, just as he went off to university. What make Rhenisch unique is his determination to return to that life, to accept his father's flawed legacy of seething, inarticulate rage and transmute it into work that is clear, wonderfully articulate and life-affirming.
"It is not the legacy or the land or the vision of life I would have chosen, but it is mine," he says, every bit as stubborn as his father.
"Make it new," was Ezra Pound's standing order to poets and Rhenisch has that very special gift of making those "usual old familiar words" jump up and dance, as if he'd just invented them.
In more than 200 pages of prose, there isn't a single cliche, trite image or shopworn phrase, or even a single sentence that doesn't bear the mark of long and careful thought.
When Michel de Montaigne invented the essai, it was the intellectual game of a bored aristocrat in retirement, pillaging classical authors for food for thought. Modern and postmodern writers have transformed it almost beyond recognition, but few have succeeded in working a magic as pure as this.
Rhenisch could have done safer things with this material. He could have written a passable coming-of-age first novel, or cynically squeezed two or three collections of poems out of it, applying for grants all the way. That he chose to do neither, to compress it all into meticulously crafted prose, demonstrates a high degree of self-confidence and self-criticism.
Harold Rhenisch now lives "in the sky" at 100 Mile House, where he is "revising" Pound's Cantos and working on a sequel to Out of the Interior. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun. Back to Top
I
FIND IT DIFFICULT TO CATEGORIZE WHAT HAROLD RHENISCH HAS DONE with
his recent publication Out of the Interior. To begin simply,
he is true to the title. He has dug deep within himself as child,
adolescent and adult to write this lyrical account of&emdash;and here
the matter clouds somewhat&emdash;himself growing up! his father
growing inward! the family orchard growing away from any form of
human control! Perhaps it's best described as symphonic writing
because of its broad range, its subtleties and rhythms. Mood and
imagery are composed from harsh clatter to gentle susurruations.
The bees feed on the sweet oozings of those flowers, and fertilize them. Out of the heavy wax frames and the scent of pine and shavings, we collect their honey-white-suited, with screens over our faces, and each movement slow and measured&emdash;but they drink it from the flowers with their whole being, out of the dancing, burning soil.
Of his father he writes: "He was simply burnt away by the sun and then caught up by the wind and driven before it."
The book defines a devotion to the wind and hard labour. It acknowledges drudgery, stupidity and blind obstinacy cheek by jowl with industriousness, majesty and perseverance. Pervading the work is a sense of defeat from men who have tried to eradicate their enemies with chemicals and machines. These are men who cannot live with "the totally random rhythms of despair and elation that are the life of a farm."
The subtitle The Lost Country refers to both new and old worlds. His ancestors left Germany after the Second World War and adopted the new west of British Columbia which could not sustain their longings. It is a country that sustained incongruity: his father sat on the porch listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, "the whole house booming so loudly ... that you could not stand inside." Rhenisch confronts war on two sides and in parallel--the war with Hitler and the war against Nature. He isn't heavy handed, and can sound almost delicate in describing the brutality:
Those were the years of wonders, years of uprooted apricots, old tires soaked in diesel oil and thrown under the shattered piles of trees to start them into fire, years of flame, a sun so thiI1 it filled the entire sky, right down to the surface of the soil. Through the columns of black diesel smoke that tore through the mounds of trees, choking with dust and ash and steam from the wet wood, it was a sun on fire. Those were the years the oxygen was burning out of the air. Where before there had been trees and grass and quiet, now there was dust and the desert stars, like welding arcs in the hull of a ship being built for war.
Exposing the calamity of spraying with poisons, Rhenisch doesn't assume a righteous tone. In essence the calamity is construed by the reader. Rhenisch supplies the details. He often plants a thought in one section, leaves off, and returns to complete it in another. This technique is extremely effective. It slows the reader down, and binds the whole together. The sections "Machines" and "Trinkets of Power" provide a good example. The first is more or less a catalogue of equipment on his father's farm. Sprayers, tractors, hammers, shovels and so forth are listed with poetic rhythm only to be followed in the next section by the opening line: "Machinery is the death of farming." He has lobbed a bright red Spartan at us and it has turned into a bomb. He continues:
It demands that the efficiency of the machine becomes the efficiency of the farm. With machines there is no entrance into the work-into the land: all you can enter is the machine itself.
Out of the interior is not a book easily put aside. It haunts me because it speaks to the "people who have genuinely and with deep feeling, given themselves to the earth." But who is listening? Those people are few, and dying out. The thread of defeat runs up the very seam of this book. In the following quote read farming for art, and definition for language:
Now the art remains, but art without an economy, a language of commerce between men, is of no value in the larger world where men do use that language.
Rhenisch doesn't explain away the death of agriculture, he describes it, and it is a painful collective loss. He has given us excellence of craft and a depth of understanding that I haven't come across in prose in a considerable length of time.
What we see when we actually touch the earth, in those places and moments when others have touched the earth before in that space, is all the world: there is no progression or progressive civilization of man and earth through time.
All the world is in this book. Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire Back to Top
Years of Wonder, Years of Uprooted Apricots Harold Rhenisch turns a poetic eye on home
POET
Harold Rhenisch grew up among the fruit trees of the Okanagan. For
anyone not familiar with the struggles of farmers, his or-
chard-based autobiography will seem surprisingly brutal. Human flesh
appears to be as delicate as the skin of an overripe peach, and the
minds and hearts of farmers as vulnerable as the plants they tend.
Out of the Interior: The Lost Country (Cacananadada) is not,
however, a maudlin book, a vengeful or pedantic one. in fact, for all
the pain, this portrait of a "lost country" is re- markably vital.
Many contemporary writers reduce life to simple sets of good and
evil, victim and victimiser, yes and no: Rhenisch's approach Is more
complex. While he frequently distills his observations into images
that can stand alone, none of them have to. His "years of wonders,
years of uprooted apricots" are skillfuly connected to images in
other eras, other lands and other minds. He never oversimplifies the
world to make a point.
Wars run through this story of a son attempting to make peace with his heritage. Plants, pigs and farmers prosper or fail because of conflicts between nations, between species, generations, races and social classes. Nothing ever stays in place; something somewhere is always happening that will cause a change out in the dark fields some night.
Braided through the tales from Harold Rhenisch's own childhood are stories from his father's youth in Germany during the Second World War. The hungry child whose life became haunted by the sight of an American P-38 straflng a starving German cow immigrated to Canada. There he raised a son who grew up to write about a child who stood in the southern British Columbia desert and watched American jet fighters roar over the border. The pilots were practicing for duty in Vietnam. The elder farmer--the father-survived the bombs and hunger of World War II to become helplessly sick from toxic crop sprays decades later. Similar sprays also ruined the lives of soldiers who wielded them in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
During the Vietnam war years, farm supply catalogues that arrived at the Rhenisch orchard were often allied with the language of war, of farmer against aphid and mite and weed. Throughout this autobiography the farmers spray and spray and spray. "Spraying is the only action in his life my father has been able to repeat."
All of this effort did not, however, always protect farmers, their families, crops and land. The industry of leisure, with its vacation homes and golf courses, increasingly replaced the holdings of hard-working farmers. Rhenisch was forced to admit, "In the end the dreams and bone weary work do not count."
As I read about this transformation in the Okanagan, I kept being reminded of Ovid's 2,000-year-old Latin poem The Metamorphoses in which gods are forever turning mortals into rocks, constellations, birds, spiders, bats, pigs and trees. Whether the transformations prove to be a blessing or a curse all depends upon the god's purposes. When a man or woman cries out to a god for its protection, they cannot know what form that protection wiil take. Also, devotion to a god is no guarantee of a happy life; the faithful worshipper is just as likely to earn the vengeful envy of yet another god and have arms turned into branches and flngers turned into leaves.
Harold's father devoted himself to his fruit trees and they consumed him. His farm became a curse:
"Simply, my father, who had come from Germany to be free, could not stand farming. He needed earth, but farming left too much bile in his mouth. The desperation of it&emdash;and the culture of it&emdash;drove him to hate himself and fed his hatred of people and the world."
Harold's father confronted a landscape in much the way immigrant farmers confronted the beauty of the Canadian west over a half century before: they were often bent and broken by ice-laden winds at the same time that pastoral poets, back on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, were celebrating the healing beauty of the natural world.
For a bitter farmer's poet son, a failed farm became a blessing, a source of visions and inspiration. In the struggles and losses he discovered his art, as well as wisdom and compassion. He has begun to forgive his father's trespasses, and his own. The author found courage in the lost orchard as well: no exhausted settler and no pastoral poet would have dared to stand up and declare, as Harold Rhenisch does, "Gods can be as stupid as the wind, yet be full of fire and rain and the scent of powdered rock." If not the beginning of a brand new land-based mythology, Out Of The Interior is certainly a respectful refinement of Ovid's old one. Erting Etiis-Bastaad, Monday Magazine
Back to Top
A Delicate Fire (1989)
Anyone
opening A Delicate Fire at random will immediately recognize
a poet who lives, works and writes close to the land. Harold Rhenisch
has a farmer's keen weather-eye for the perpetual, minute, almost
magical transformations that make up the natural world and a gift for
coining images of intense immediacy. A cold winter in Rhenisch's
world is moose antlers "like thoughts frozen/as soon as they hit the
air" and wolves so "thin with hunger/they walked/right on the
surface/of the snow".
But what gives Rhenisch's work its uncommon depth is the constant tension between the natural world and the world of words and ideas in which he is equally at home."The land as we hold it in words" he says, "is the land that words can hold,/but it is seen through loss/and not possession".
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.
Eleusis (1985)
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
To read more, please click on a link below.
Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>
