Russell Thornton has published five previous books of poetry, with House Built of Rain being shortlisted for the BC Book Prize and the ReLit Poetry Award and Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain shortlisted for the 2013 Governor General’s Award. Thornton won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine’s Ralph Gustafson Prize in 2009. He lives in North Vancouver.
Judges’ Citation
The poems in The Hundred Lives burn with a rare blend of rhythmic intensity and hard-earned experience that make them at once timeless and contemporary; on page after page, in line after line, we hear the ancient, communal music of language sung through a consciousness of maturity, loss, and restless spiritual hunger.
The poems in The Hundred Lives burn with a rare blend of rhythmic intensity and hard-earned experience that make them at once timeless and contemporary; on page after page, in line after line, we hear the ancient, communal music of language sung through a consciousness of maturity, loss, and restless spiritual hunger. In a very real sense, Thornton’s lyric narratives and dialogues – of travel, of Lazarus and the Song of Songs, of romantic love – dramatically enact Robert Frost’s notion that the greatest of all attempts is ‘to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity’. Thornton speaks with utter conviction and credibility to forge a personal vision, a ‘pathway through the apple’, to an always-richer understanding of human experience. Whether the poems take us to Greece, where gypsy women move ‘like living tarot in the street’, or to the memory of a beloved grandmother ‘out in the sailing ship of her wedding dress. Her ashes’, always The Hundred Lives puts us in intimate touch with ‘first fire, first waters’, with the tenderness and pain of vital engagement.
Selected poems
by Russell Thornton
Once, I would make certain my name
did not appear in any directory. Now
I dream I am back in different times and places,
and the people I remember I loved
are not there, and the places not at all
as they were, and it is as if I have belonged
to some underground organization
set up to allow no member
to betray another – no member ever
knowing who his associates actually are.
Now I agree to be listed, I ask to be listed –
and hope that this will make it easy to find me.
And now I dream of a list. On it
everything I and those I have been with
have ever truly felt or done is recorded
in the clearest detail. In the same dream
is a man who walks alongside me and knows
nothing but the entire list by heart,
and will recite it to the moment I die,
and then he too will disappear.
Copyright © Russell Thornton 2014
A List
Anniversaries circle round again. My grandparents
marrying in the sun. The guests in their best attire.
The filled vaulted room. Then the clinking glasses.
Then the private rites of those who waited long.
It is there in the light. Light that is a window.
And is a mirroring seas for my grandmother
out in the sailing ship of her wedding dress. Her ashes.
Someone I loved dying alone. The month the wide frame
of her final leaving. It was also her birth month. Light
opens its window, and is window upon window.
Her living hair darkens beyond its living black.
That black is another light, no visible sun
burning in its origins but a dark transparency,
and it arrives like another her, again and again.
I too am a window. In August, two people
among the dead look out of it. They do not know
the window is me. And I am what a window can wish.
To open endlessly because it is light,
and because it is a mirror, let the silver erase itself
and arrive and wait flawless on the glass,
and darken, and erase itself, like life, like death.
Copyright © Russell Thornton 2014
Anniversaries, End of August
I find webpages and see the faces
of two of your now forty-something siblings,
and imagine how you looked in middle age.
Study even the obituary notice picture
of your mother, seventy-eight, for clues.
But you are twenty-two. It is late summer,
you are wearing white pants, a simple blouse,
you stand at a distance and smile slightly,
and let me take a photograph of you.
You are there in sunlight, in my cells –
you are there, you are twenty-two.
Meals I did not sit and eat with you,
and my food and drink without you now,
all of it nourishment for the cells –
the cells vanished along with what they held
of what I was and what I knew of you
and since replaced with new cells,
and the cells still here, which will vanish.
I saw somewhere among a poet’s lines,
What is not of flesh, we won’t remember.
And I know that the cells of the body
both remember and disavow the body.
And the living flesh is its testimony
that it can only remember then forget.
And the sunlight falling all around you
is timeless, blameless, and continues falling.
And what is of the body, we will remember
because it is what we can possess, though it can’t last.
And what is not of the body, if we imagine
it is another body that can only remember –
even then it can’t save us. The body will forget us,
and if the spirit can tell us it knows us,
or which among the scattering and fading cells
comprised us, we won’t be there to hear it.
Far inside the cells of my body now,
where I am only barely a body, in sunlight
you are twenty-two, and you remember and forget,
and you arrive neither to fulfill touch
nor invisibly hold sway, and you step toward me.
Copyright © Russell Thornton 2014
Cells
I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
filling fine sheets –
I would not see them again.
The last items I had left.
The dates. The phrases.
The things you said. Forfeited.
Snowflake patterns.
Leaf diagrams.
Crushed. Melted. Dissolved.
The flooding runoff
at the backed-up
street corner drain
collects it all.
Only the opening
of a strong seal far below
could allow that pool
of darkening rainwater
to run and drop away
between the slats.
If I were to recover
the lost key of the cursive,
I would in one instant
want back again what I saw
in the images
the hand traced out for me.
And would be denied
even the little
the letters kept of you
and be released
into nothing but more time.
Copyright © Russell Thornton 2014