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

Rhenisch, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1779400152 ISBN 13: 9781779400154

Publisher: University of Regina Press, 2024

Synopsis

Harold Rhenisch’s poems balance the settler and Indigenous experiences of land and water in the Pacific Northwest A collection of shanties (songs) laid out in couplets that move between English and Chinook Wawa, The Salmon Shanties celebrates a poetic tradition deeply rooted on 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 voice 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./p.

About this title

About the Author

Harold Rhenisch has published 33 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, translation, criticism and nonfiction since 1981. He has twice won both the CBC Prize and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and received the George Ryga Prize for Social Responsibility in Literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1779400152
• ISBN 13: 9781779400154
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208