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.

Harold Rhenisch is an award-winning poet, critic, and cultural commentator. His awards include the Confederation Poetry Prize in 1991 and the BC #38: 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. He is the author of 32 books of poetry, fiction, biography and essays and choreographed Richard Rathwell’s Human Nation for the paper stage. Along with the Norwegian Olav Hauge, he is one of the two poets in the world who learned to write and edit poems by pruning fruit trees, an experience documented in his The Tree Whisperer (Gaspereau, 2021). A direct heir of Bertolt Brecht’s theater, through the dissident playwright and novelist Stefan Schütz, whose radio play Peyote he translated and published, he has invented a theatrical set of cross-genre literary interventions. He has secretly edited and mentored over a hundred writers in the hinterlands of Canada unserved by its university and publishing system and is currently writing a transcultural natural history curriculum and a history of British Columbia centred in the Indian Wars of the American West.

Harold Rhenisch's profile page

"Rhenisch jam-packs his songs with ideas, zooming and spanning, yet with the grace of a skilled composer; a song might jar and rattle while at the same time carry a croon that compels. A reader cannot help but be swept and stilled simultaneously in the lyric experience. "—The BC Review

“Harold Rhenisch is one of Canada’s finest poets.”—Nancy Holmes

“The land and waters themselves entrusted Harold Rhenisch to write these transcendent poems.” —Kathleen Flenniken

“Rhenisch’s words sing as water moves through them, making us one with the sea.” —Linda Rogers

“This is an astonishing book. It rips the world open. It takes no prisoners. It upends the entire overlay of globalism that has turned a peach into an industrial product. It is an ecstatic unravelling of the delusions of the present. Rhenisch’s visionary and prophetic voice joins those of the Indigenous Cascadian past to restore, in poetry, the sane and beautiful way of its water-keepers.” —Sharon Thesen

“Immersed in The Salmon Shanties, I feel like I’ve been following spawning kokanee all the way to the mountains, guided by the songs of sandhill cranes. These are the most expansive—at once loamy and riparian, documentary and cosmic—and the most learned, and the most rhythmically musical poems I’ve read in a long time (possibly ever).” —Kelly Shepherd

“Rhenisch’s poems weave geography, ecology and metaphor in unexpected ways. His writing is full of energy and insight.” —Don Gayton, ecologist and author of The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home

“Harold is a magical ‘singer of this land,’ calling us home, to our Illahie, where we belong. Bursting with energies, these songs of Cascadia pour through like a waterfall cascading over the edge of history.” —David McCloskey, Cascadia Institute