‘Think of the book as a river’

Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl (The Book of Gates, Vol. 1)
by Tom McGauley (Afterword by Luke Franklin)

Moncton: Galleon Books, 2025
$29.99 / 9781998122080

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

*

Chrysoprase is a green precious stone. Bowls are cut from it to honour enhancing the sacral chakra, below the navel. Centre of the world kind of stuff.

Think of the book as a river. Its words drift on the swirling, chrysoprase-green ntx̌witkw (Columbia River), where the nt̓iltxítkw (Kootenay River) pours into it at kp̓íƛ̓els (Brilliant). That’s on the north side of the nt̓iltxítkw’s delta, across from Castlegar.

Modernism was the local cultural foundation when Tom McGauley worked on early poems in this project at the Selkirk College Campus in Castlegar, on the south side of the nt̓iltxítkw’s delta, also in kp̓íƛ̓els.

A feminine place. A triangle cut in half by flowing water. A life-giving place, an old salmon fishing hole, a place that calls fish and humans to death and life together. 

It’s like the eagle down that Chief Jim James sprinkled on the water of shonitku (Kettle Falls) on June 14, 1940, as the water began to fill up behind Grand Coulee Dam. He was calling the salmon home—some day.

That includes to kp̓íƛ̓els. That McGauley doesn’t mention it as a sexual and birth place yet goes around the world to find it, suggests he’s looking for something else: not the place but a spiritual essence that radiates from it and forms its meaning. A physical language, in other words.

This principle streams through this book. Have a look at McGauley referencing Gloucester and Óðinn in an extended King Lear:

Naked on raven’s back ask what of England dies with him?

What darkened with Gloucester’s bloody eyes?

McGauley’s note on the observation that Shakespeare is far from home in British Columbia is subtler than most. He concludes the poem with:

Night soughs why this place where no fauns come?

                    Wasted, wasted, all letters lie.

Sacred dances, it seems, no longer take place at kp̓íƛ̓els. This isn’t ancient Greece. There are no fauns playing pipes. McGauley’s conclusion, that all letters lie, including the ones that make his poem, is the way poetry was fifty years ago, when the sacred frolic at the start of Greek culture was honoured here as a linguistic foundation. 

That culture is largely dead. To his credit, McGauley knew it. In its place, he holds land and water, even if he travels for a lifetime, always writing this book, which comes to us late, in the year of his passing.

What a shame that it wasn’t part of the conversation all along. These aren’t poems to be read as an archive. They are dense meditative scripts to nail to a wall and to contemplate for a week, or a month, until each is both a landscape and a body. Then the next one comes.

Each dies in turn. Each is born in succession. That’s the sacrifice of the world. The chakra, carved in its place, attempts to bring it back as wordless song.

McGauley’s bowl is also Doukobor culture, that sacred community that settled around Grand Forks and Castlegar, including at kp̓íƛ̓els. The sect’s leader, Peter Verigin, was assassinated on the train between Castlegar and Grand Forks. McGauley’s close friend, Harry Kootnikoff, was blown up with the premature ignition of a homemade dynamite bomb. In the name of holy purity, villages were burned to the ground. These were terrible ends for a prophetic culture that abandoned textual traditions and government authority for oral witness. 

In this posthumous volume, McGauley is a prophet in Verigin’s tradition, just one who picks up the pieces. Some might call this an anti-colonial project now. Or a homoerotic one. Or a misogynistic one. Such variance is what you get when language is this deep and suggestive—when it works this hard to avoid definitions and intellectual categorization to become physical. Read it as your experience tells you, but here it is:

But blunt bone

boys beat

crumbles like

Roman cement

Wooden patriarch

washes away

municipal

hermetic slough.

The Book of Gates flows from a lifetime’s work of building British Columbia into modern North American culture through gates opened by Robin Blaser, Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, and Charles Olson, and from there into the temple ruins of pre-Columbian Mexico, with other shards from Indian, South American and Nuxalk cultures, and from pre-Christian Europe.

Farther south on the ntx̌witkw, in 1941 Woody Guthrie honoured the death of the river at Grand Coulee Dam with his “Columbia River Roll On,” celebrating its harnessing to the Bonneville Power Administration’s electrical grid. What was the free and flooding river was no more. 

Dams now constrict the ntx̌witkw to the North and South of kp̓íƛ̓els. Smelters, mills and highways scar it, harvest it for capital, and break access. Dams have transformed the nt̓iltxítkw into a series of holding ponds feeding turbines. These machines were once the great industrial promise of modernist British Columbia and its myths that industrial investment would spread wealth everywhere.

It didn’t. That overlay of concrete overpasses, dams built of rock shards dumped into the river, industrialized water flows, poisoned hills, and a stream of lead making the fish downstream in the waters impounded behind Grand Coulee Dam inedible, is very real, though.

So are the green chrysoprase bowls of the rivers’ eddies. As McGauley travels the world to fill his bowl, it’s the Nile that does so, a legacy of the years when the Nile cultures of antiquity joined Greek ones as a measure of human evolution in British Columbia, even though local cultures were far older.

In McGauley’s boyhood in Castlegar, though, the Sinixt of kp̓íƛ̓els were down south in Inchelium, on the same ntx̌witkw, and called extinct. In response to the erasure, McGauley’s material is drawn in from around the world. It’s only physically that he can respond to the nt̓iltxítkw swirling in a bowl before entering the the muscling spine of chakras in the big river.

The modernist at the root of this all is Ezra Pound, who went on the same walkabout a couple generations before, and ended his life’s work with comments that the shards wouldn’t cohere. He fills this book.

Long after British Columbia’s modernist dream had been disproven by Capital’s stubborn adherence to its sources rather than the points at which it touched earth and water, McGauley kept at Pound’s work. The result is a book (the first of three!) appearing long after its original context has been lost. 

If Blaser’s your guy, or Olson, Wah, or Pound, you’re going to need to get one of these and nail its pages to your wall. The lines are tough and full of bones, like dried salmon, but respond well to chewing. 

As McGauley says in his forward, rewriting Pound tongue in cheek,

no reward for them it reads

these have all perished

loves jealousies memory passed out of

nor will they ever play in whatever

They haven’t perished, though. This might be a book of shards, but poems are built from them, stacking them up until they flood forward in streams of energy: an image at once phallic and hydroelectric. 

Each of the 200 pages here can be contemplated in the same way you might contemplate the ntx̌witkw off kp̓íƛ̓els, the Keenleyside Dam just upriver, or the Brilliant dam just up the nt̓iltxítkw. I mean, just look at McGauley merge the Nile with this industrialized eddy between two dams:

There a river from a desert, nonetheless fluid, broad-banked

templed, commercial, full of vegetarian silt. In its

attendant monuments bulls tick-free sacrificed

un-tasted supple menhirs, black to tail

fertile as a Nubian smelter.

A smelter, yet, like at Trail downriver. This flow isn’t Herakleitos’s river that you can’t step into twice. It flows on forever, in every river there is, while still precisely here. 

“Here,” writes McGauley, nodding to Guthrie, “speech begins within copper wires / not sarcophagus stairs” from ancient Egypt or “trailing quetzal’s aurora” in a conflated Yukon and Mexico, or back on the fire-scarred ntx̌witkw, “where delicate tongue twists past juniper lips.”

It is a world observed in detail and rendered in a language phenomenally non-narrative, with a syntax of belief but not of grammatical syntax or metrics:

              With tendril tenderness

speech seizes cold chaos where all surges.

What flows here is the surging of the river out of the piled words that dam it, while the ironies within the approach, the way hearings of words layer on each other, make each moment a singing chrysoprase bowl.

And take heart. This year two salmon released above the Grand Coulee Dam in 2023 made it home as far as the Wells Dam, just south of the confluence of the Okanogan River. Just two dams to go now. They’re knocking at the door.

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 W.H. New, 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.]

*

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