‘Always direct … always honest’

Existence In All Its Uncoverable Beauty 
by Calvin White

Surrey: Now or Never Publishing, 2026
$19.95 / 9781989689981

Reviewed by Harold Rhensisch

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One moment you are huddling under a tarp on the street. Then someone convinces you it’s safe to pull the tarp off, and there you are, beautiful, because bodies touched or seen by others are beautiful.

That’s Calvin White’s Existence In All Tts Uncoverable Beauty in a nutshell.

To this sense of beauty, White adds philosophies ranging from European existentialism to Buddhist nonbeing. His focus is on very hard things like mental health, homelessness, and the sometimes invisible distinctions between life, death, and love.

To read White in this book is reminiscent of reading Thomas Hardy, the great novelist and poet, whose stories often ended tragically because his lovers missed each other by looking the wrong way at the right time. White goes further. He says that we don’t have to pay attention, because the earth does.

He is as relentless about it as Hardy. When criticized for being a pessimist, Hardy said he was an “ameliorist.” He meant to say that he was looking at things with a cold eye, neither as an optimist nor a pessimist. White updates Hardy’s five syllable tongue twister with a homebuilt Zen koan to say:

                             no one deserves to eat
simply because they are hungry.

Hardy was glum. White is sly. He is no Buddha, yet he is a poet whose craft allows him to negate his own koan. He does so by upgrading Keats’ famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with all its “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” as:

I exist.   I exist.   I exist
that is all that matters

Keats’ sonorous rhythms have been flattened to the tantric breathing of an animal trying to calm itself in a zoo.

Salmon Arm-based White (Facing the Sweating Horse) is serious about this. He is a professional psychologist about the “what matters” game in two ways. Where Keats was writing a warning—a prescient one as it turns out—about technē, a Greek term now split into art and technology, White is writing a prescription.

Throughout his poems, White pushes the observation that both poems and and the selves they express are constructed things, buildings, and that those buildings are prisons. You get to be free within them, but only within them. When the poem is over, the act of building a reading of the poem freezes and you’re stuck in a cage. You can’t get out! Bodies survive in this artful construct as breath, waiting and fearful. This awareness makes White’s poems instances of defiance, in an argument that technology is death and the work humans must do is to live, as the Earth does.

He does so with the classic tricks of Canadian verse: lines that appear as flat as translation, chanted as if pounded out while jogging, stacked without end punctuation but with the occasional comma in the middle just like the Saskatchewan landscape that gave birth to the technique, and with words spaced deliberately, arhythmically on the page or blown open into individual letters, which is as sentimental as it ever was.

These traditions go way back. There was Bliss Carman, for instance, a Canadian poet writing British verses in an American style channelling New Age metaphysics to gush about landscapes in the BC Interior in the 1920s, as if they were British country house wallpaper. Now there is Calvin White using ee cummings’ tricks of deliberate spacing to suggest what poetry might be if it weren’t a prison of fulfilled expectations. A distracting focus on poetry as deliberate communication and the channelling of emotional intelligence remains.

The intelligence is perceptive, though. In “High Walls,” for instance, White knocks down any sense of grandeur there might be in tradition by simultaneously dismantling ancient Secwépemc mythology and Canadian mythologies of frontier Libertarian resistance by presenting a tree you climb to the sky. In Secwépemc tellings, such trees are shamanic ladders. In White’s telling, there’s no destination, just a climb that goes on and on, and the nagging question:

and who can say the sky is really free and blue
and not just another sad conspiracy
to trick us

He’s as glum as Hardy, after all!

Or not. As a counsellor, White has long been a witness of the price of individuality and the cost of isolation. As a poet as well, he knows how seductive words can be: the things so often just lead poets and readers on to foregone conclusions set by the the cultural patterns of the thoughts language allows. It’s refreshing to watch White try to pick the locks of these cages.

His skeleton key is community—specifically, communication: the building of a mind together that is a conversation. White is not presenting the ends of conversations, which are nouns like house, pitchfork, and rock. He is presenting how people come together via the process of thinking things through. 

This affection for verbs is so up front that it’s even in the book’s title: Existence In All Its Uncoverable Beauty. The title is a great log haul truck full of nouns, yes, but what do they translate as while you read them? Be! A verb!

That call is quintessentially Canadian. As Margaret Atwood pointed out so long ago, Canada is a series of forts in an Indigenous wilderness called a wilderness because it isn’t in the fort. One feels pretty vulnerable in a fort. With his comment that “nouns are lonely / they repeat,” White is right there with her. In this world of forts and nouns, helplessness and separation are rooted in violence against tenderness and the breaking of connection. 

You’d be right to call that the fundamental settler experience. It’s also a description of a world of things. They are both nouns. They are both frozen processes. They are possessions that possess one. They are all poems. The living processes that fill them, which White calls nature, on the other hand, are all flow and movement: the living water of a stream or how a forest is alive with the sound of birds. 

It’s not a modern distinction. It’s a very British Columbian one, though, because White dissects the boundary between flowing and standing still in terms of that national, settler and Indigenous identifier, “land”:

land and all upon it
to be taken 
washed of its presumption
reminded
of smallness
and order

For White, nature redeems modern existence, because it is without hope. It just “is” and, as far as White sees it, “there is no need to speak, the trees do” 

The language is the language of the street: always direct, sometimes plain, at times sentimental, even silly, yet always honest. This is people’s poetry, in the style of Charlottetown’s Milton Acorn, the Cariboo’s Lorne Dufour, or the Okanagan’s John la Greca.

It’s also a bit too tidy. However directly White wants us to contemplate the traps of life, he almost always lands on hope, the thing he claims that nature lacks. On his streets, poetry and people, even whole lives, might be thrown away, but everyone there is still human, because, in White’s words,

no matter
how we dress it
agony
passes so easily
for style

White doesn’t believe in prolonging agony. He expresses an optimistic faith in human connection with the eye of a psychologist who has made a practice of not turning away, in passages like:

    beneath it all
just as it is beneath the tarp of the homeless
there is a deadly serious wish for well-being
a wish that gentleness can find its way

While this practice never quite flies away from its poetic cages, it is not as simple as White’s direct, accessible language appears to make it. At the core of this philosophy, there is death, a body, a living thing, a thing with life in it, becoming bound and still.

White fights such death and stasis with his admonition to “be.” In his world, that often means “be together.” His poem “Rescue” is a good example, with its conclusion that “being found rises in the heart more magnificent than any sun”

He can’t follow that sun, of course, because its presence is dependent on a Western separation of humans and nature and their reunification through words, yet along the way he does manage to break the false boundary of isolation down enough to see over to an unsettled and beautiful country.

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 blo Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, George Bowering, bill bissett, Garth Martens, Diana Hayes, Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, and Tom McGauley for BCR. His newest volume, 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 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.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster