
The Broken Face
Description
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The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familiar relationships he ushers in a connection with something transcendent: "A man has come floundering late in the night / to stand alone at the shore of a sleeping infant's face."
The poems capture life at the periphery, whether describing homelessness or incarceration, or even the universal experiences of aging and mortality, love and fear of love, all of which bring the speaker into a detached yet energized state of watching and waiting: "the door that was my grandfather into our passing lives / will arrive at a house where each of us is his own door / that opens on our first selves, fundamental together."
With intense lyricism, Thornton displays a mastery of craft so complete as to be nearly invisible. While stunningly beautiful, his imagery is also in such complete service to the deeper emotional resonance of each poem that it feels inevitable, and contributes to making the collection deeply moving.
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Person
Russell Thornton is the author of The Hundred Lives (2014), shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013), shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His other titles are The Fifth Window, A Tunisian Notebook, House Built of Rain (shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry) and The Human Shore. Thornton's poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies, among them Love Me True, Sustenance, Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, In Fine Form, Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry. His poems have been featured several times on Vancouver buses as part of BC's Poetry in Transit. Thornton has lived for extended periods of time in Montreal, in Aberystwyth, Wales, and in Salonica, Greece. For the past number of years he has lived where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.
Content
- Intro
- I
- Scales
- Screaming
- A Man on Death Row
- Open
- Driving
- Jail
- Week-Old Son
- Cell
- Gunman
- A Drop of Blood
- The Chance
- II
- Water Makes Its Way
- Soccer Ball
- Teeth
- Tying Shoes
- Question
- My Four-Year-Old Son and a Bicycle Pump
- Copper Door
- Dandelions
- Picking Blackberries with My Daughter
- Xmastime Dancing
- Woolly Snow
- III
- The Shore
- Bubble
- Tiny Crabs
- North Vancouver
- When the Rain Comes
- Cart Riders
- Sirens
- Aftermath
- At Safeway
- Stopping the Waves
- Wildfire: Photos
- Stroller
- The Water and the Stone Trap
- IV
- Birthmark
- Two Houses
- A Dove
- O God, Beast, Mystery, Come!
- The Broken Face
- Summer Vineyard, Naramata
- The Finch, Questions and Answers
- A Photograph
- Girl on a Tire Swing
- The Wound
- Creating a Timeline
- Change
- Notes & Acknowledgements
- About the Author
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