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list price: $16.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Mar 2013
ISBN:9781550176018
publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain

by Russell Thornton

tagged: canadian
Description

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

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 (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 (2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim Editions, 2002), House Built of Rain (2003; shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore (2006) and The Broken Face (2018). His most recent collection is Answer to Blue (2021). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.

Awards
  • Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
  • Short-listed, Raymond Souster Award
  • Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry

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