Two Songs

Russell Thornton—a Canadian poet in the tradition of Irving Layton, Earle Birney, and Gwendolyn MacEwen—celebrates the fierce mysteries of life in these lyrics of love, loss, and metamorphosis.

“Life and Death were songs …” With this epigraph from Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Thornton introduces his own tightly woven life-death songs as he has practiced them over twenty-five years. His themes are nature’s beautiful din, the love and violence of families, the serious smile of abiding ancient cultures, and the wonder of faraway places. In scenes ranging from the Greek sun of the Peloponnese to the firs on Vancouver’s North Shore to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Thornton’s lyrics access vitality and elemental power—depicting a circular arrangement of human skulls and bones in catacombs in Peru; migrants on a night bus; a murder of crows and criminals; a conclave of shopping cart riders. Like the amphoras the poet finds in Tunisia, these poems are beautiful both for their shapely lines and for their dark emptiness, as imminently unspeakable as a Cézanne still life. At the same time, these poems bring forth intense brightness. Thornton has called the art of poetry “a conjuring and reconciling of forces—the kinetic energy of words meeting vital experience.” One might just call this poetry magic.