|
|
Harold Rhenisch Iodine, or Eating Red Licorice at the Elks' Rodeo Parade, 1963 |
|
Wolsak and Wynn, 1995. ISBN: 1-919897-40-1 6x 9 78 pp $12
Harold
Rhenisch speaks with a lyric intensity so powerful that the poems
throb and distrub and exhilarate as they move, as George Woodcock
observed, "from narrative to descriptive to reflective to
meditative." Combine this with Rhenisch's idiosyncratic brand of
humour, and you end up with one of Canada's most exciting new voices.
These poems alternate between psalms in the speech of contemporary
Canada, and true, often tragic, stories of a man who spent 16 years
living in an abandoned mineshaft on a mountain between the orchards
of the Similkameen and Okanagan Valleys in British Columbia. His
companions were 30 dogs which had left the farms below to live with
him.
Sample PoemsHymn For Small Engine Repair On His Way Back to the Store for More Dogfood Graceland Hymn for Kleenex and a Nylon Comb The Song of Our Lord, or There Ain't No Cure for LoveHYMN FOR SMALL ENGINE REPAIR As the faller longs for virgin timber and the moss crackling underfoot So do we long for our Lord and as the pipefitter longs for Saturday so he can wake up beside his wife and turn over to hold her because his skin feels like sheet metal and his bones like galvanized iron so does our god long for lightning all night and white rain in the morning so he can watch all the farmers get up and walk around aimlessly, waiting not knowing what to do with such freedom! So does the god of the fouled sparkplug open up a small engine repair shop in the weatherbeaten garage behind his trailer It is perfect! right down to the Briggs and Stratton sign nailed above the door and the rusted lawnmowers strewn around through the cactus and the sagebrush When I sit down and think on it I want to weep Because when the people start to come in their nylon-mesh hats with the sun-faded brims their pickups bouncing over the shale and drag their broken machines before him I want to see him come out of his dark doorway Because I want to see the pity in his eyes I want to see how he handles it when his people return to him I want to be there Choose another sample ON HIS WAY BACK TO THE STORE FOR MORE DOGFOODHighway 3There was a woman riding a horse on the gravel shoulder. The horse looked at him with pity, with the bit in her mouth and the saddle sinched up around her gut. He looked at her with pity too: in his dreams the devil sat on his back and whipped him on the bare buttocks until the blood ran and he began to weep in Spanish about revolution and replanting his cocaine fields with coffee, to keep people awake half the night and restless, and then they put the electrodes to the glans of his penis and hooked him up to the corroded car battery until he lost consciousness and it was morning, and the sun was on the streets outside like spilled engine oil, and flies, and hungry children. The horse saw it too, and the skin all down her flanks rippled, a shudder passing back from her mind through her whole body, and she flicked her tail and stamped her feet. Giddyap said the woman in the saddle and dug the spurs into her flank and pulled hard on the bit so it pinched her on the lips. Giddyap! Choose another sample GRACELAND Our lord the carpenter comes out of the woodwork writhing, white, and blind Wherever there is a nail and a hammer He is there between them and wherever there is one hour between the morning and the evening that is from neither the pas de deux nor the stilleto He is there with his brace and bit and his claw hammer He loves nothing better than a young woman pulling on her panty hose her hairbrush in her teeth Like the Bata Shoesalesman at Orchard Park Mall in Kelowna who looks first at a person's feet on introduction and then only then clasps their hands in his Praise him! Oh we adore him! May we never be parted from the waiting room at the Canadian Tire Service Centre in Penticton For he is there standing on a carhood up on the hydraulic hoist with a microphone dressed in Rhinestones giving his Elvis impression Love me Tender! Love me true! Choose another sample HYMN FOR KLEENEX AND A NYLON COMB Let us now open our hymnbooks and sign the paen of the whipped cream siphon O Cholesterol! O Cholesterol! Let us toughen our hearts against adversity and breathe the secret name of our Lord Cholesterol, be not proud We have opened our kitchen cupboards to the secret name of our god And he is like a hot water tap among us and the cabbage loopers writhing in the catchbasin! Choose another sample THE SONG OF OUR LORD, or THERE AIN'T NO CURE FOR LOVE Dad kick off your hiking boots and wash your feet in the Similkameen River that drains the sky through us! Because there is a worm in every bottle of springwater Because there is a worm under every pillow Because there is a worm in every mouth and we need a rest! You can see everything but we are only a tired crew at the end of the nightshift walking off into the streets of Moscow and beating back the Germans with our pipe wrenches and sledgehammers and we need a rest You're strong alright like the yellow floodwaters of the Fraser but we are just kids, Dad we like the National Geographic We're tired of books without pictures We need an afternoon nap! Choose another sample
To read more, please click on a link below.
Home.
©Harold Rhenisch, 2002. All rights reserved.
Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>
