‘Rough trails off the map’

Inventing What We Need to Know
by W.H. New

Oakville: Rock’s Mills Press, 2025
$20.00 / 9781772443240

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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W.H. New has set about opening Vancouver to the world. It’s a world trading city, but it’s also British and provincial. 

At least, in New’s lifetime. He is of that BC generation raised in a Canada that was a Dominion, under a king (George VI), within an empire, and during a war. That war lasted from 1914 to 1945. New’s childhood was during the second act, from 1939 to 1945.

In Learning What We Need to Know, New calls this historical period a parenthesis. Grammarians (as a professor of English, he was one) know that parentheses are a way to signal that an action is separate from the (main) show of a sentence. 

It is also a protected space. Dislocation doesn’t happen there, only somewhere else. New (In the Plague Year) plays with this characteristic in this collection, as he moves back and forth across the boundary between protection and exposure. 

His medium is the stories he learned the world from, and which weren’t entirely accurate. Childhood protected him from war, for example. 

The result is strangeness. The book portrays an Englishness that Vancouver no longer openly displays, even while using this displacement to sketch the outline of a future outside the parenthesis. 

This cleverness and enlightenment comes with a snag, though. It is a world hard to see. In New’s argument, the world that Vancouverites (and likely all humans) have built is created out of the innocent assumptions of childhoods informed by popular propaganda and culture.

The culture, however, isn’t exactly innocent. The stories didn’t begin with Vancouver. “It seems so long ago,” New writes of his mother’s stories of family back in England, “and distant, like a story in a language I didn’t ever / learn.” To embrace her present, New writes in “Harry’s Brothers,” his mother read to her children “Oz and animal tales instead, supposing // they would teach us happiness, a world where / everything stayed in its right place.”

Stability might have been the goal, yet the only lasting stability is that this world of stories replacing loss and confusion is hard to escape. Any attempt to see the future lands in an image of the past, at best, and more likely in nothing. The possible world of the future is gone. One can look back, but a child is there. The stories it has been told are the world, whether they are Oz or wartime propaganda, and they’re just stories, after all, not the world. Beyond that is only the unknown—everything of which the child wasn’t conscious.  

Naming is central to this boundary-making. In New’s time, “Arithmetic” notes, children “learned about tracks and rocks and / lighthouse points: learned that Captain George [Vancouver] had named / them too, but for his friends, whose names were Brockton / Atkinson and Grey.” The naming became history.

As New acknowledges, colonial naming erased the histories of the people Indigenous to the place the city had claimed, and so thoroughly that they’re initially hard to see. New’s way through the darkness is to name the naming. Captain George Vancouver, he writes in “Arithmetic,”

                didn’t see the villages he sailed past:
he didn’t name Ulksen, or Skaywitsut, or Whoi Whoi, or Snauq,
or else ignored them: maybe he saw an absence he didn’t wish
to name or thought the people in place already always here
didn’t altogether count: maybe he couldn’t hear the syllables
of Halkomelem languages (sən ̓aʔqʷ and χʷay̓χʷəy̓) or just decided
not to listen to ancestral stories, place and custom.

It’s not New’s only way of feeling out a forward path in the shadows. To escape the set of projected colonial images received as reality by childhood and to view Vancouver in its full historical and social context, New writes poems with the voice of a child and an elder at once: the person who is the creation of that storied childhood. 

For all its English strangeness, it’s smart stuff. In a city that has broken out of its parenthesis, in short a city that is dead and gone, to build a new city in its place, it is a book of a child facing death. In poem after poem, New recalls moments of warning, when death was fully present—a burning house, for instance—but distant to a child’s eye. Older now, with a clear eye on mortality, he now tells these stories with clearer eyes, to educate the child.

In “Paper trails,” he reveals his method with typically symbolic language:

The front room
was where we kept the chairs we never sat in.
The ones for Company.

It is a poem, however, about the Second World War, as the elder New now chips in:

I could read by the time I saw the war map
that granddad had tacked to the wood storage wall—

As boy again, New colours the marks of the battle front with crayons, not knowing what they are but imagining secrets, which he was able to decode. Eventually, he became the editor of Canadian Literature, at the University of British Columbia in Point Grey, annotating work (strangers’ symbolic hideaways) that came across his desk, within parentheses. Finally, imagining what comes after living becomes a life, he finds, in “Paper trails,” that the conceptions of childhood still resonate:

And sometimes, in winter,
I look for rough trails off the map,
and I follow them as far as they will let me
into the crayon mountains.

The symbolism is rich, and British. Or British Columbian. Robin Skelton, a transposed Brit, was writing poems in this vein in the 1970s and 1980s, while looking back to T.S. Eliot, who was looking back to new England. Eliot and Skelton are both echoed in this book.

British Columbia was once a world of names charged with emotional attachments but lacking attachments to place. This British Vancouver has not been challenged or celebrated with such energy since George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies romped through it in 1984.

Does the approach itself work? Partly. As New explains in his notes, Stanley Park’s Siwash Rock is “a ‘transformation stone’—the Musqueam name for the rock is Sɬχil̕əx, meaning ‘the Standing One,’ and the Squamish name is Slhx̱i7lsh, meaning ‘Standing Man.’”

Transformation stones are formative points of human identity. New’s tentative erasure of colonial naming protocols, and his acceptance of what has spirit in its own right (before individual discovery or even discovery of the individual), is a smart and honest reconciliation. The stone is still doing its work. 

When I write that the approach “partly” works, I mean that this English Vancouver and its readers is much diminished these days. The Englishness of all this might find a limited audience.

Or it might find a big one. The new Asian city of Vancouver is perhaps the last city of the English Empire not yet fully transformed by postmodernism. It was once a sister colonial hub to Singapore, Shanghai, Madras, Calcutta, Nairobi, (etc), just to name a few. Perhaps it draws so many people from Asia because its parenthetical nature is home in a world otherwise closing off that interlude.

If so, New’s work here is invaluable as a guide to telling better transformative stories in this place. Nonetheless, New’s treatment of Vancouver’s formative past largely misses those other parentheses within it: the post World War II Vancouver of war refugees and European exiles, and of the working proletariat fighting to be seen. For many Vancouverites, that is the city, still waiting for its own parentheses to be erased.

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 has recently reviewed books by Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest book, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster