"The Salmon Shanties : A Cascadian Song Cycle" by Harold Rhenish

Event Details

When
Mar 11, 2025 from 07:00 PM to 08:00 PM
Where
Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park
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A Nature of Writing speaker series event, in partnership with Third Place Books

the salmon shanties.jpg
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 land’s 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, Rhenisch’s work sings of roots to the land lifted up by the sea into the sky—as if Ezra Pound had sung of Cascadia instead of Europe.

Do not be in Mareuil and Périgeux tonight; it is 1912 no longer.
We, the land’s 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 N’kmp,
and the long memories of the dwarf shrews of Nighthawk.
Breath cannot be denied. Poh cannot be forsaken. Ezra, shantie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harold Rhenisch has published 33 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, translation, criticism and nonfiction since 1981. He has twice won both the CBC Prize and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and received the George Ryga Prize for Social Responsibility in Literature.

ABOUT OUR BOOKSELLER PARTNER
Now celebrating over 25 years in business, Third Place Books is a Pacific Northwest bookselling institution with three locations in the Seattle area, each featuring a partner restaurant and gathering space. Hosting nearly 300 author events a year, Third Place Books has proudly supported Puget Sound authors since 1998.