The Blue Mouth of Morning

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

This collection of poems by B.C. rancher Harold Rhenisch is a deft
presentation of surrealism, family history, and literary elegies. Some
of the poems previously appeared in Canadian Literature, Event, and the
1995 and 1996 CBC/Saturday Night/Tilden Literary Competition. These
credits establish this poet’s literary stature, a judgment seconded by
the British Columbia Arts Council, which awarded him a completion grant.

Rhenisch may be mainstream, but he can be controversial. His first
poem, “The Real Work,” has Coyote, the North American aboriginal
“Trickster,” making mischief on a ranch. Native Canadians and their
“politically correct” allies may charge the poet with “cultural
appropriation.” However, Coyote is not the only trickster here;
Rhenisch finds a new identity for this shape-shifting spirit as a
rancher’s hobgoblin.

Shakespeare and Milton become 1950s lakeside merchants in “Paradise
Found.” Plato, in “Plato’s Penance,” “runs a timber-cruising
company / out of Williams Lake.” Mozart becomes a cowboy in “Home on
the Range.” “The Magician” audaciously eulogizes B.C. literary
figure Robin Skelton: the shaggy author is depicted with “his head
shaven, wearing black leather, / only a G-string between his
buttocks.” Rhenisch confronts his more conventional grandfather in
“The Nazi Doctor”; he balances family loyalties and historical
truths by describing the surgeon’s memories, but points out that
“This war is of my grandfather’s making.”

Rhenisch declares that poetry is his true skin in his curiously titled
verse, “The Renaissance Confessional Boxes.” Perhaps, but critics
and readers prefer to explore his inner soul.