A Delicate Fire

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

Rhenisch refers to his new collection of poems as “five discrete
manuscripts,” and adds that “the arrangement and selection of the
poems is Robin Skelton’s, not [his] own.” The result is an
interesting compilation of poems including portraits and landscapes,
enigmas and surrealistic sketches, and literary musings and
philosophical ruminations. The sense of place remains strong throughout
this progression from external to internal: the poems are close to the
land, specifically to the poet’s Similkameen Valley in British
Columbia (“this valley of Balsam and high light”).

This quality is particularly true of the first two sections of the
book, respectively (and appropriately) entitled “This Land” and
“The Valley.” Here family portraits and landscapes appear in
detailed imagistic descriptions, intermingled with reflections on life,
places, people, and the passage of time. The poems move from specific
portraits of individuals and settings (including the poet on his daily
chores in his orchard and forest) to more generalized descriptions and
reflections.

“He and She,” “Coyote and Crow,” and “The Koan” are
considerably more esoteric and less sharply defined, the reader
transporting into enigmatic musing, legends and mythologies, interior
landscapes of insights and enlightenment. Yet the imagery of the land
keeps reappearing, tying the poems together and tying the poet to the
earth, to the immediate surroundings and realities of his life. True to
the Zen-Buddhistic meaning of the final section’s title (“The
Koan”), Rhenisch presents a variety of “cases” as a means of
awakening consciousness—a series of perceptive dialectics meant to
result in new insights into the perplexities of existence.