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"Russell Thornton writes some of the most skillfully crafted lyrics in Canada."
--Chris Banks, winner of the Jack Chalmers Poetry Award
About the author
Russell Thornton’s collection The Hundred Lives (Quattro Books, 2014) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2013) was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His other titles include The Fifth Window (Thistledown Press, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim Editions, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2003; shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore and The Broken Face (Harbour Publishing, 2006 and 2018). His most recent collection is Answer to Blue (Harbour Publishing, 2021). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.
Summary
The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught
trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive . . .
--from "Nest of the Swan's Bones"
Russell Thornton's latest collection of poems, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain, explores powerful, primary human relationships through images of two worlds: the natural and the urban industrial.
Simple grass is the iron of an invisible forging within nature that involves the human creative consciousness. A scavenger alley crow is the universal creative spirit in brutal primordial disguise. A murderously violent father and son are integrated into a single new man who walks "bright as a song in the air." A young daughter flings up her arms to seagulls that "collect up the world, opening it like a door." An infant son fights the "anger in him ... the death ... with the heaven in living flailing hands."
Intensely personal, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain reveals how essential human identity reinitiates human consciousness in a participatory universe.
"Russell Thornton writes some of the most skillfully crafted lyrics in Canada."
--Chris Banks, winner of the Jack Chalmers Poetry Award
