Salmon Shanties, The

The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle
by Harold Rhenisch
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781779400154

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