Eleusis

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

The Eleusinian mysteries, from which Rhenisch evidently takes his title, are the rites in celebration of Demeter and Persephone, the Greek deities of earth and the seasons. Rhenisch’s poetry uses women and nature a great deal to create a world a little beyond the everyday, a place of feeling and idea and event in which humans are connected to the earth and the elements. A rhapsodical vision creates many of these poems; some are explicit allegories, as “Thursday Night,” in which a poem comes walking up out of the tomato field and dumps itself on the poet’s desk. A surreal quality reveals itself also in poems on memory: the bizarre and the fragmented qualities of a photograph album, mysterious and grotesque, are reduced and explained, yet also emphasized and expanded upon. This creates a disturbing sense of a life past and remote and still able, also, to trouble the present.