Poet, bioregional essayist, and explorer of post-colonial landscapes in decay and transition, Harold Rhenisch combines his father's character with his own, and in a series of luminous, closely-linked stories, takes the reader 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, to playing war games in the forest and, finally, to miracles of healing as the fabric of the world collapses and must be rebuilt.Hansel, his mother, and their 16-year-old Russian maid, tend 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 also brings them 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. This story is not fiction. It is the art of story-telling that creates for us Hansel's fairytale village -- at once a magical world of mermaids, witches, carnival characters and eelfishers, and also a sulfur-choked, brutalized wartime town.The Canadian farmer who was Hansel returns to this German town to relive the dreams, stories, and terrors he experienced fifty years before. In incandescent, emotionally-charged prose he seeks among the ruins of society to understand love and his place in the world as a man. This is a powerful and captivating evocation of innocence and storytelling from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Carnival

Literature & Fiction

Rhenisch, Harold

Literary

Porcupine's Quill

Winter

Sono Nis Press

Extending the forms of autobiography, Rhenisch explores the immigrant experience in the orchard gardens of the Okanogan. The search for paradise in the new land, its discovery and loss, are portrayed through the experiences of a young boy struggling against the authoritarianism of patriarchy. This prose memoir of unrivalled intensity and beauty helps to fill a gap in the history of twentieth-century Canada.

Out of the Interior: The Lost Country

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Ronsdale Press

Return to Open Water: Poems New and Selected

Poetry

Ronsdale Pr

Harold Rhenisch's poems balance the settler and Indigenous experiences of land and water in the Pacific Northwest A collection of shanties laid out in couplets that move between English and Chinook Wawa, The Salmon Shanties celebrates a poetic tradition deeply rooted in the West Coast. Harold Rhenisch explores memories of people, place, and of returning home, speaking the land's names as a music of its own and creating a series of aural maps. Imbued with rhythms of Secwepemc grass dances, the colloquial chatter of the Canadian poet Al Purdy, and the spirit of poet and historian Charles Lillard, Rhenisch's work sings of roots to the land lifted up by the sea into the sky--as if Ezra Pound had sung of Cascadia instead of Europe. Do not be in Mareuil and Périgeux tonight; it is 1912 no longer. We, the land's singers, are walking the star road on the long way home with the crickets of a July evening above Tuc el Nuit, the burrowing owls of N'kmp, and the long memories of the dwarf shrews of Nighthawk. Breath cannot be denied. Poh cannot be forsaken. Ezra, shantie.

The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle (Oskana Poetry & Poetics)

University of Regina Press

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Books by Rhenisch, Harold