Spring, 1982 photo by Robert Chatfield

Harold Rhenisch Work in Progress

Fall, 1998 photo by Diane Rhenisch

Carnival
      Tom Thomson's Shack
      The Marriage of Gonzago to His Heirs and Concubines
      The Similkameen Elegies
      The Poetry of Silence
      The Poetry of Snow
      Concrete and Visual Poetry 
      Switching Trains: A Novel on German Immigrants in the Okanagan Valley

Carnival

Hansel, his mother, and their 16-year-old Russian maid, nurse an escaped French P.O.W. in their basement in a small town on the edge of the Black Forest during the Second World War. During the Occupation, this act simultaneously saves their lives and brings them too close to death, as they attempt to save the innkeeper's daughter after a brutal rape by occupying Moroccan soldiers and the horrific punishment enacted upon them by the French command. The art of story-telling gives us Hansel's village, simultaneously a magical world of mermaids, witches, eelfishers and a miraculous Bible, and a sulfur-choked, brutalized wartime town. After a lifetime farming in Canada, Hansel returns to settle his mother's estate, and finds himself engulfed by the past. His life in Canada is revealed as a false dream. In his crisis, Hansel is saved by his recreation of his mother's story-telling. In a series of luminous, closely-linked stories, Rhenisch takes us on an emotional journey through humour, joy, heartbreak, horror, spiritual catastrophe and redemption, to present a second look at history. This is war from a child's eyes, up close and personal, from silly pranks, such as wiring the maid up to 220 power, to playing war games in the forest and, finally, to miracles of healing as the fabric of the world collapses and must be rebuilt. It is rebuilt, in a powerful and captivating evocation of innocence and story-telling, celebrated, lost, and re-found, from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

A novel, forthcoming from Porcupine's Quill.

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Tom Thomson's Shack

The sequel to Out of the Interior: the Lost Country. Forthcoming from New Star Books

In 1984, Rhenisch travelled to Toronto for seven days to publicize his book Iodine. This book is the story of that trip, framed in the story of the land he left to travel there. In clear, visual prose he sets forth two alternate visions of Canada, painting a passionate portrait of rural Canada and setting forth a new vision of a Canada reconciled. A zen beekeeper, a backwoods rancher who collects abstract art, fly fishermen on the Thompson River, laconic borderguards, home winemakers, horses, a welder, scavenging eagles, a banker, Matisse, the Group of Seven, a horse logger who lived for 5 years in a tent at 50 Below, and even two native men on Appaloosa horses driving their cattle through the orchards of the Similkameen Valley, move through the pages of the book, telling their tales.

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The Marriage of Gonzago to his Heirs and Concubines

The Continuation of "In the Presence of Ghosts".

These poems were originally written on the request of Charles Lillard, who also suggested that Ezra Pound be allowed to speak for himself. The rest is history. In this combination of The Cantos, the Inferno, The Waste Land, The Canterbury Tales, and The Winnebago Trickster Cycle, Robin Skelton visits Hell, where he meets Ezra Pound. Together with a group of modernist writers including T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Bertolt Brecht, and not one but two Hemingways, they go on a pilgrimage of escape.They make it to Paradise, but, being dead and damned do not recognize it, and travel on into the desert. Each poem in the sequence is framed by the story of a group of contemporary women writers attending an arts festival in the North. The results are pretty wild, spoken in an ever-changing voice. A romp.

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The Similkameen Elegies

A revisitation of Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.

The ancient, gnostic theme of the estrangement of humankind from its true self, expressed through the neo-platonic philosophy of Porphyry, is in this book returned to the earth. Behind the screens of Thomas Taylor's 200 year old translation, and the screens of Iamblichus laying an ancient Egyptian conception of the cosmos into the foundations of medieval rhetoric, lies a world of intense beauty. The loss of this world has led to much of the falsehood and ugliness of the modern world. In these poems, built out of clarity and colloquial speech, that ancient, unified cosmos is purified, and the bureaucratic aspirations of both Thomas Taylor, translator, and Iamblichus, rhetoratician, are laid to rest.

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The Poetry of Silence

W.S. Graham wrote of a writer in prison, speaking through a screen to a visiting reader. The writer could only infer the presence of the reader, the reader only infer the presence of the writer. All they shared was the screen between them -- which gave an intimation of the other. These new poems take as their starting point an exploration of that unknown, unexplored point of silence between the creation and reception of thought. They do so in poems which use silence as a compositional tool, sometimes highly-structured, sometimes as a random static, sometimes absorbed completely within the matter of the poems themselves.

Poems based on a fusion between the soundscapes of Glen Gould and the compositions for voices of John Cage.

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The Poetry of Snow

InThe Blue Mouth of Morning, Mozart, Shakespeare, and Coyote slip in and out of the words in a variety of guises, masks for the remaking of the imagination. In these new poems, the speaking self is cast into the world, where it speaks in a new mask, as the snow, with the same mythic clarity and trickster humour. In the process, the traditional Western conception of the self is completely transformed.

An extension of The Blue Mouth of Morning and Taking the Breath Away.

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Concrete and Visual Poetry

These playful poems explore the boundary between the visual and the verbal, as well as the nature of the lyric impulse when freed from words entirely. As P.K. Page said, "If you can write or draw, you can do the other. They come from the same place."

I have been composing these pieces since 1981, slowly transcribing them into finished form.

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Switching Trains: A Novel on German Immigrants in the Okanagan Valley

My grandparents came to the Okanagan Valley in 1929, from Breslau, Silesia. This is their story, the story of my cousin, Hans, broken by the railroad, famed across Canada as "the laziest man on the trains," and the conflict between the dreams and reality of a cast of other Germans, young and old, in Canada and the Old World.

The Okanagan of my childhood was simultaneously an English colony and a German country.

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©Harold Rhenisch, 2002

Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>