‘It is the 1970s. It is forever.’

Sprocket
by Al Rempel

Qualicum Beach, Caitlin Press, 2025 
$20.00 / 9781773861654

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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Al Rempel is a kid riding his bike in Arnold, on the Sumas Prairie, under Mount Baker in the Southern Fraser Valley. It is the 1970s. It is forever. Rempel is watching himself running through and riding his memories through the green farms.

These are just two of the sprockets that push the poems on, just as metal gears power a bicycle. Riding a bike is about balance—as long as there is movement, and as long as you stay on.

The sprocket of a bike allows you to create forward energy greater than your falling weight, so you keep moving, through a series of near falls until you dismount to get up to something with your friends, for dinner, or because childhood is over, or because you hit a ditch.

Bicycles carry you far. They are agents of freedom. The poems in Sprocket, though, aren’t precisely free. They are tied to each run and ride and memory. They live with incredible intensity, but only within the boundaries of going out and back. 

There’s freedom in that, yet the poems, the sprockets, are outside it: little angular bits of technology. Prince George-based Rempel (Undiscovered Country) calls them prose poems. They’re more like long single lines with breaths that catch and then let go with the downward move of legs on pedals, jumps over small hills, good landings and young feet pounding on the ground as they run—

what were we running from in the field was it the circling cry of the hawk as we went hunting for blackberries untouched by anyone else on the other side of the slough the bushes dripping dark purple on our chins so why were we running Lonny and Robert calling out somewhere close by behind the bladed green are we there yet not yet not yet

And that’s Sprocket. It is a hymn to pushing downward, pressing on a pedal into a chain, which turns a sprocket that amplifies its energy into forward motion, which is then balanced by a body and its arms and legs walking in place. It’s a chain of echoes.

In other words, Sprocket is about having just enough freedom to learn to be an adult, whether that is in the writing of poems, or by taking a family onto your shoulders, or, as Rempel’s parents did, a farm. It keeps you upright and moving forward. That’s life. You’re not precisely independent, but you are on your way.

In terms of craft, every poem in Sprocket moves at great dodging speed, balancing the onward drive of a lack of punctuation (you punctuate you fall) with the human bodily drive for a starting and an ending point. 

All poems, even rides like these, and even physical poems such as Rempel’s boyhood rides, must end. Rempel’s do with both feet on the ground as he leaves the bike behind and runs on.

Arnold is a largely Mennonite community. That faith in family, farming, and transcendence shows: simply and honourably. Rempel’s rides are rides of words, breath, and spirit—dances through childhood, when the world is unified and eternal, and parents are mythic beings. 

In adulthood, awareness of their fragility creeps in:

dad used to clasp his hands tight in front of me as we sat waiting for supper in the dining room next to the desk with the big black phone he’d lock his fingers together and my job was to pry them open release some of that power even the two stubs on his right hand they were pinched off at work guiding a pin into a hitch of a machine the skin sewn over where his nails should be sometimes he let me win

In the same light of wealth within poverty, here are his Mom and Dad together, balancing:

Fridays was always pasta with cans of tomato soup poured over spaghetti for supper so mom and dad could shop for groceries but we didn’t complain much about that only the liver and onions we covered with ketchup while dad thoughtfully ate from his can of tuna

At this point in Sprocket, balance begins to be transferred to an adult social plane, one of care—care for self, care for the world, care for the child one was, care for the children one brings into the world, and care for the parents, fragile now, who one wants to protect and keep alive even by such simple spells as these. 

This is one of those books that rides this line with ease. You can read it for the profound hymn it presents of childhood, in the tradition of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Rempel has matched that masterpiece.

You can also read Sprocket in delight at the sheer energy of the boys it presents, infinite in scope, unbounded in their imagination. You can read it, too, for the balanced ride between the tension of language and the world it represents and as a love story—for Rempel’s parents, and for the daughter he wrote it for, so that she “could learn where I came from and what it was like to grow up in Arnold.” 

Irony is always present. At the same time that Sprocket presents the trickster energy of boyhood, it’s inimitable curiosity and acceptance, the book looks right through that energy into the poverty of a hard farming life. The wealth is in the heart here. For the adults it is work. Childhood is a gift, but not one just for the children alone.

And it all goes by so fast. One day Rempel looks up and his mother is laughing at his innocent tricks as he tests her boundaries. On another day, childhood is gone. Just like that.

Adulthood follows, but it is outside of the frame of the picture. By definition, transcendence is like that. It’s harshly final, and set at a distance here so it doesn’t break into sentimentality.

It’s not really that far, though. We can always ride the book again, as Rempel has done by writing it.

He is riding (writing) memory now, holding the bike for a moment, for the next rider to catch their balance and take up the ride’s grace.

This is a book full of life. You’ll appreciate the push. You’ll want to keep going.

[Editor’s note: Al Rempel reads with Harold Rhenisch at Russell Books, in Victoria, on March 28th at 7.30 pm.]

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold Rhenisch has reviewed books by Hari Alluri, Brian Day, Jason Emde, John Givins, DC Reid, Kim Trainor, Dallas Hunt, Tim Bowling, Hamish Ballantyne, Zoë Landale, Kerry Gilbert, Robert Hilles, Sho Yamagushiku, Bradley Peters, Aaron Tucker, Dale Tracy, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Selina Boan, Joseph Dandurand, Délani Valin, Robert Bringhurst, Rayya Liebich, Sarah de Leeuw, Roger Farr, Stephan Torre, Don Gayton, and Calvin White for BCR. Recently, his The Salmon Shanties was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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