Poetry. In this spirited celebration of the creative spirit, Harold Rhenisch presents a vision of the world that places Canada, and poetry, at the crossroads of world culture. Included are a hymn for whales, a love poem for herring, black-comic stagings of Shakespeare, tongue-in-cheek deconstructions and celebrations of philosophy and literature, laments for the missteps of history, enraged political blasts, and deep ecological lyrics. Mozart enters riding the bulls into the Williams Lake Stampede, and a rhinestoned Jesus sings Elvis lyrics on a car hoist at Canadian Tire. In RETURN TO OPEN WATER, this award-winning poet, critic, and cultural critic fuses American, British and European verse traditions into a poetics able to reimagine literature and history and return them to us in illuminated form. Long-praised for his innovative creative nonfiction and his mastery of the long poem form, in this volume Rhenisch presents the roots of that intelligence and its furthest extensions. This "New & Selected" presents the best poems--comical, elegiac, satiric and lyrical--from the twelve volumes of verse of one of Canada's best, most original, and most mercurial poets.

Author City: Campbell River, BC CAN

Harold Rhenisch is the author of twenty-one books, including 14 collections of poetry, including Living Will, a translation of Shakespeare's sonnets into contemporary erotic English. He has published four volumes of creative-nonfiction, including the George Ryga Award-winning The Wolves at Evelyn, and Cross-Country Checkup Book of the Year, Tom Thomson's Shack. In addition, he is the editor of Robin Skelton's posthumous poems, Facing the Light, and his new selected poems, In This Poem I Am. He has published one novel, Carnival, and is the English translator of the postmodernist German playwright Stefan Schuetz. He has won the ARC Poem of the Year Prize, the ARC Critic's Desk Award, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for both 2005 and 2007, and is the second prize winner for the CBC Literary Prize in Poetry for 2008. A year's work as editor and cowriter on Chris Harris's photographic book about the earth's last intact pristine grasslands, Spirit in the Grass: the Lost Landscape of the Cariboo-Chilcotin, has garnered two B.C. Book Prize nominations. Rhenisch's Return to Open Water: Selected and New Poems selects from oral pieces spanning the last twenty-nine years, honed during his more than 300 readings during the last decade, across Canada and abroad. An active editor, reviewer, and mentor, he lives in Campbell River, British Columbia, after 15 years on the Cariboo Plateau, and a dozen years in the Similkameen Valley.