“The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle”
By Harold Rhenisch
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9-781779-400154
I was excited to read BC poet Harold Rhenisch’s The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle, as I know him to be a respected writer working in various genres—including fiction, nonfiction and memoir—and his poetry’s been recognized with several awards. The latest of his thirty-three books swims upstream with salmon through Cascadia’s rivers, sings the songs of history as experienced by the English and Chinook Wawa, laments how humans have abused this earth and each other, and praises the natural world and its creatures, from grass to mountains to sky. The poems, scored mostly in couplets, are detail-rich and I recommend reading them slowly to savour the language, names and ideas. It’s also helpful to read them in tandem with the author’s notes on the poems and his extensive glossary of Chinook Wawa—a blended language “of trade and diplomacy … as developed by the wives of traders at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River” that was commonly used across the Pacific Northwest.
In naming these poems shanties (songs), one can rightfully expect that they’re musical. Readers hear grasshoppers “click-clacking in their bone song,” and the “crackle/of gravel from the wheels bringing us home.” There is, in fact, a lot of gravel in this book, including “glacier-washed gravel” and “platinum gravel,” and this demonstrates the poet’s particular facility with description. There’s also an abundance of grass: “wheatgrass,” “needle-and-thread grass,” “canary grass,” “porcupine grass,” “dune grass,” “bunchgrass,” “rye grass,” “cheatgrass,” and “mind’s/quick grass/braided by deft fingers around a black fire.” When a poet infuses this much effort into one element alone, we can appreciate how much consideration has gone into each poem, and can celebrate that the poet swapped out his early peach-picking “for the machine gun of free verse,” though he tells “young poets to run” and says “Books failed as keepers of men’s souls.”
These are poems of journeys, place and legend. Of highways and “the light on the mountains, long after the beginning has ended.” And definitely, the themes of continuity and all things being “one” is woven throughout these accomplished pieces. “All of us star creatures are one breath,” Rhenisch writes in a poem titled “Round for the Mind of the World.” And in “Snass Shanty” we find “We are one substance,” and “Everything is rain. Everything is falling and then rising back up.” In a later poem, this truth: “Do we not/all have hands or wings or leaves or stamens or some damned thing/that can reach out and touch each other?”
Indeed. And rare’s the bard who can make poetry of tossed whiskey bottles:
The empties flashed briefly, tumbling over and over, catching the Sun,
blinding,
before they landed among the tufted grouse, sagebrush sparrows, and
sweat bees.
They’ve been there ever since, home to spiders,”
Please do “Pull up a stump and share this campfire coffee.” You’ll rediscover what you may already know: “There is only the salmon and the salmon again,/and a boy’s going and our coming, and our coming and going.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Sticks & Bones: Haiku and Senryu”
By Allison Douglas-Tourner
Published by YNWP
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 978-1-77869-043-3
I’m fond of image-based poetry, and it’s one reason I enjoy reading poems written as haiku and senryu. Likely you remember haiku from school days: in its traditional form, it’s a three-line, seventeen-syllable nature-based poem with a five-seven-five syllable count. It conveys a single moment in which the poet suddenly sees or realizes something. An aha! moment, if you will. Senryu is similarly structured, but it’s more concerned with human nature and often contains irony or satire. Both forms originated in Japan, and both are unrhymed.
Victoria, BC’s Allison Douglas-Tourner recently released a lovely collection, Sticks & Bones: Haiku and Senryu, which reminded me of why I enjoy these concise forms so much. It’s easy to find inspiration from the natural world on Vancouver Island, and she explains that the island’s “beaches, woods, and meadows” have long been inspiring her. Ravens, those busy gatherers of “sticks and bones,” have also stirred her to write, and the attractive cover image of her small, square-shaped book features a single raven with twigs in its beak. There’s one page-centred poem per page with ample white space surrounding it … an ideal format for these untitled poems which invite one to linger, to roll the images and sounds and metaphors around in the mind before moving on to the next one.
Consider the tenderness, the alliteration and the metaphor in the following:
the gentle touch
of sunlight on stone
a tiny pair of shoes
I admire the poet’s ability to think of sunlight as “a tiny pair of shoes,” and this way of seeing and presenting things differently is the hallmark of good poetry. Here’s another wonderful metaphor:
last leaf to fall …
a threadbare
handkerchief
The ellipsis directs a reader to pause and it imitates the slow journey of a leaf from branch to ground. It’s autumn as I write this, so this seasonal piece especially appeals to me, and I love the idea of a leaf, probably shot-through with holes, being a “threadbare handkerchief.” And in this fall-themed poem, I drink in the warmth and revel, again, in the delicious metaphor:
autumn sun
a slow cup of
smoky tea
The following poem makes me consider mother-daughter relationships that can sometimes feel like a “broken clasp”.
broken clasp—
Mom’s cool hand
on my forehead
Douglas-Tourner is also adept at personification. She has a moth in a window “[holding] the storm at bay,” and a tree “scratches/at the shutters.” She uses assonance to great advantage in a poem that juxtaposes a blinking flashlight and a cricket “that/didn’t exist”. Her skill in writing about the senses is evident in several pieces. She writes of “the mildew scent/of mice” and of “coaxing the crystal/to sing”.
Many of these meditative and meticulous poems were previously published in international journals and on blogs. I will pick this book up again and again, as whether rooted in the natural or the domestic world, these tiny poems “[give] the imagination room to breathe,” and they make an impressive emotional mark.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin”
By Johnathan A. Allan
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$32.95 ISBN 9-781779-4003307
Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin is a well-researched interdisciplinary book by Manitoba professor Jonathan A. Allan, and though it’s structured like most academic books I’ve read—with an introduction, an appendix, an impressive bibliography and index, and conclusions at the end of each chapter—the subject matter is completely unique, and perhaps not one my aunt will be discussing in her book club. Uncut gets up close and personal with foreskins. It includes the age-old debates concerning circumcision; aesthetics; the penis in art; the topic of cut/uncut sexuality; foreskin restoration; and it speaks of “the ongoing fear of the foreskin, since the foreskin is so absent from American culture.”
Allan’s no stranger to sensitive topics. The Canada Research Chair in Men and Masculinities at Brandon University previously authored Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. I was curious to learn why he writes about “really rather odd topics”—like the pros and cons of foreskins—and found my answer in his introduction:
While it may be tempting to dismiss the foreskin as an irrelevant object of
study, I argue the contrary by demonstrating not only how divisive debates
about removing the foreskin have become, but also by showing ongoing
confusion and curiosity about the foreskin.
He writes that “The medicalization of circumcision began in earnest in the nineteenth century,” as it was alleged that uncut males were more inclined to masturbate, which, it was believed, could lead to a host of medical ailments, including asthma and deafness. Today, most readers are likely aware of the debates for and against circumcision. The “for” camp cite reasons including medical, hygiene, religion, aesthetics (some parents want their infant boys to look like Dad), and even locker room bullying. The “intactivists” consider the pain and “mutilation” of the act, potentially decreased sexual pleasure, and economics, too, can play into the decision not to circumcise: in Canada, only Manitoba still covers the procedure, if completed within “the first twenty-eight days of life.”
Allan further states this his “interest is very much in the division and how the foreskin is represented and understood,” and he does a fine job of proving that division via a wide variety of resources, from Sex and the City quotes (“there was so much skin. It was like a Shar-Pei”) to Dr. Spock’s revised advice on circumcision (“he decided it was no longer necessary”).
In his analysis of pregnancy/parenting books, he found that overall the advice re: circumcision is that the choice should ultimately be left up to the parents. The writer also found that bodily “norms” are in flux, and points to bodies in the history of art, ie: David and in pornography.
The author presents an extensive and balanced debate re: the pros and cons of foreskins. Unlike pro-circumcision Charlotte in Sex and the City, Allan “[flips] the narrative that the foreskin is ugly, and instead [argues] that the foreskin is beautiful,” and he writes that “perhaps we ought to just leave the foreskin alone.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
