Harold Rhenisch’s Tom Thomson’s Shack is filled with arresting images. A poet with 11 previous books to his credit – including the recent novel Carnival – Rhenisch has turned his hand this time to short essays, on topics ranging from pruning fruit trees to book publicity tours. Some of the 150 pieces gathered here are as short as half a page, and none take longer to read than the time needed to fall asleep after a day spent outdoors in brilliant, burning cold.

Cold, indeed, is the jumping-off point for many of Rhenisch’s musings. For example: “All night the ice that had formed in the shallow black water rimming the shore would break up in the night breeze with the sound of a hundred thousand faint little crystal bells in the starlight.”

These recurring images would seem to be Rhenisch’s natural poetic vocabulary: he was born in a blizzard, and now lives on the Cariboo Plateau of British Columbia. Although he’s studied literature at university, travelled in Europe, and obviously reads widely, he remains firmly attached to the land. What he calls the “conversation between city and country” is the real subject of this book, I think.

But I’m not really sure. Because the book jumps from image to image and place to place without a strong narrative thread or developing philosophical argument, it’s hard to see just what Rhenisch’s overall point is. Perhaps we are to draw our own conclusions by comparing Tom Thomson’s shack, which plays only a small part in the book, with a hand-built cabin at the northern reaches of settlement in B.C., which Rhenisch describes in an epilogue. Thomson’s former studio is now a museum classroom not far from Toronto, while the cabin, home to a stroke-felled friend of the author, is a place of purity and poetry. Rhenisch’s disappointment with the former and his admiration for the latter are among the few clear things in the book.