The Salmon Shanties

Harold Rhenischs 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 lands 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, Rhenischs work sings of roots to the land lifted up by the sea into the skyas if Ezra Pound had sung of Cascadia instead of Europe. Do not be in Mareuil and Prigeux tonight; it is 1912 no longer. We, the lands 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 Nkmp, and the long memories of the dwarf shrews of Nighthawk. Breath cannot be denied. Poh cannot be forsaken. Ezra, shantie./p.