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Poetry Canadian

Free Will

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Publisher
Ronsdale Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2004
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781553800132
    Publish Date
    Jan 2004
    List Price
    $14.95

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Description

Harold Rhenisch's first artistic love was the theatre. Twenty-eight years after first playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he brings Shakespeare alive for us in this sparkling and inventive work fusing drama, poetry and consummate clowning. These poems are onstage, under the lights, dressed in greasepaint and tights. Some of them are vaudeville acts, others are new stagings of Shakespeare's plays, scripts for Punch and Judy puppet theatre, stand-up comedies and carnie shows, whileothers include versions of Shakespeare's sonnets set on prime time television. Hamlet is being written by 10,000 monkeys locked in a room, and a review of Macbeth is played in the City of Fools. Settings range from the London Blitz, to Chernobyl and the Cariboo, and from Berlin in 1933 to the Globe Theatre in London, where the actors and their roles change places and are faced, at last, with the choice of free will. In these alternately satiric and elegiac poems, crossing the line between dreaming and waking, Rhenisch gives us the world as a tragi-comic theatre in a provocative vision of human intelligence and transformation. Along the way, Rhenisch teases truth, recasts Shakespeare's major tragedies so they focus on their women, and puts on and takes off masks, always with the goal of freeing Will Shakespeare and releasing the passion of the poetic and dramatic traditions from the cloak of habit. This is Rhenisch the trickster at his best, in poems that both renew the lyrical and satiric traditions, and move them into a new sense of myth and light-footed irony.

About the author

Harold Rhenisch is an award-winning poet, critic, and cultural commentator. His awards include the Confederation Poetry Prize in 1991 and the BC &: Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing in 1996. He is a seven-time runner-up for the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest. In 2005, he won the ARC Magazine Critics Desk Award for best long poetry review and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for "Abandon." He won this prize again in 2007 for "The Bone Yard." His non-fiction book Tom Thomson's Shack was short-listed for two BC Book Prizes in 2000. For its sequel, The Wolves at Evelyn, he won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Literature.  Harold Rhenisch has recently moved from 150 Mile House in BC’s Cariboo region to Campbell River on Vancouver Island.

Harold Rhenisch's profile page

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