House Built of Rain

by Russell Thornton

tagged: canadian

Description

Russell Thornton has the rare ability to be both keenly observant of the minute details of his environment and intensely introspective. His poetry is full of startling images that will stay with you long after turning the final page.

In House Built of Rain, Thornton takes his readers on a dizzying journey of human experience - from the yearning of a young child to the sorrow of an adult losing a loved one to Alzheimer's. He covers a lot of ground along the way, witnessing prostitutes "counting out their smiles,/ and hiding in their pupils" or hiking to the mouth of the Capilano River where "the gulls know how the waters of this place can run two ways at once."

Thornton writes about extremes: the moment of conception and the moment of death, tranquil forests and smoky urban bars, abuse and tenderness. Concerned but never pessimistic, fierce but compassionate, narrative but lyrical, House Built of Rain is a balanced collection of work that reveals Thornton's considerable talents as a wordsmith. Though his poems are often dark and edgy, he shows us beauty in a scream, ecstasy in violence and, in a dying breath, the universe.

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.

Excerpt

THE EYES OF TRAVEL

No one recalls how long ago the last train left,
but the first houses, the houses that went up in a throng
alongside the track when the train first ran,
and are derelict now, seem to cling to the memory.
The houses' creaking front doors, their paint peeling,
are like old, now never-looked-at mirrors,
and the crumbling front porches, the gates and fences,
stare at nothing, like desolate people.

The ones who stepped onto the train and were gone
are still young, still in love, their hearts like liquid light.
Somewhere they are all still on the train,
though none of them know where it is going--
all they know is that they had to become travellers.
Now their hearts, quick and unfailing, are one with the train's rhythm,
their faces, lit torches in an endless night, lead the way.
Now they themselves are the only pair of rails they follow.

If we bring new wood and make repairs,
and if we retouch the town's sad houses,
our own hearts will still be those the loving ones abandoned.
If we gaze after them, and if we praise them,
and our eyes turn bright with exquisite distance,
our eyes will still be the tracks their eyes left behind,
like the sunken tracks sheep make, streaming ahead of us
into the promised land, in the promised land.

THE ST. ALICE

The Indian bar. One side for the Squamish,
one for the Whites. Lower Lonsdale locus
of an older North Van. Invisible now,
those soaked tables, the brass depths
of the draft, the brass- and stainless-steel-
bar-counter- and glass-washer-hued cold hearth
of unappeasable sadness. You sat down
as in a church in the comfort
of warily shared supreme discomfort.
Said the clipped, musical litany. Cabs flowed
to the curb to take people home
to the lower Lonsdale reserves, the Indian
and the White. The saloon doors
swinging open on the dark.
That moment of animal poise
in the shame of being there, human,
on display, the cells nailed to a cross. No one
looked at anyone else, yet each knew
where his or her self and every other was
to the exact subtlety
of antler-tips of spirit. Another beer,
two glasses, yes. Money left
on the table, but twenties not shown.
The washroom glare non-worldly
as of a forced interrogation room.
Last call, then off-sales for later.
The slender brown hand of a raven-haired one
is still reaching to her stinking dewy glass
as the server slaps a wet cloth across her table.
An old shipyard worker, his ruined hand
oddly delicate, and beautiful like her hand,
lets his fingers rest on his glass. All of a sudden,
Cezanne's apples are there, as if
about to slide off new surfaces.

Awards

Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize

Editorial Reviews

Read what the a href=http://www.prairiefire.mb.ca/reviews/thornton_r.html>Prairie Fire Review of Books had to say about House Built of Rain.

— Prairie Fire Review of Books review

"'A man is singing karaoke/ in the Seabus terminal./ His voice is a ghost's/ making a gape in the air/ as it moves out/ among the commuters. . .' Thornton lives in North Van, and this collection is rich in allusions to Lonsdale, the Capilano River, blue buses and other North Shore places and things (and moods). His poems are descriptive and observational and seem to exist in the dark wet shadow of the mountains."
-George Fetherling, Vancouver Sun

— Vancouver Sun

"Always alert to the ephemeral, Thornton makes of spring's first sparrows 'little light-carpenters,' because the season will end; he looks with tenderness at the 'woe-papery faces' of late-night bus travellers, knowing that daylight will flatten those faces. And so, when in a gritty, long-gone North Vancouver bar of his memory he sees Cézanne's apples 'about to slide off new surfaces,' one admires not only his startling juxtaposition but his ability to see what others would have missed, to trust what he sees, to make us see it, too."
-Stephanie Bolster

— Stephanie Bolster

"[Thornton's] use of refrain, cumulative syntactical effects, an easy, loping line, a vanishing, meditative or spiritual reach all have a mesmerizing ebb and flow to them. In another poem, "Circle of Leaves," falling foliage has a... hypnotic effect, leaving us feeling in descent as though we were bouyant, lighter than air, and the effect is characteristic of the poems as well...So we pass through these mist-enveloped poems, 'letting the good dreams go through / but holding onto the bad ones / until they dissolved and vanished."
-Jefferey Donaldson, University of Toronto Quarterly

— U of T Quarterly

"These luminous poems are gestures toward the infinite that contain all the gritty particulars of the everyday. The seamless movement through memories of a father, exotic travels, and back to the ravines of North Vancouver brings us to a place where the descent and the ascent are one: 'as I descend,/ I am ascending, more and more leaves flowing into my arms and away.'"
-Susan McCaslin

— Susan McCaslin

"Why doesn't Russell Thornton have a wider readership? . . . Thornton has written another collection of deeply affecting, impeccably constructed poems that recover and restore a life lived, imagined, re-lived and ultimately wrested from the swamp of the personal to become common language. Parable, oneiric memoir, family history and flights of song all appear in House Built of Rain, acting as guides through equally enthralling stretches of pain, love, loss and restoration. These poems gain much of their integrity from Thornton's facility with rhythm and metre. The well-timed, piercing images adorning these lines are carried along on a calm river of pentameter that Thornton varies or ruptures where emotional stress dictates. The abiding connectedness of things not human, in spite of and alongside the human, places Thornton's poems somewhere in the West Coast tradition started by Robinson Jeffers. And he extends that tradition with a saturation of beauty and brutality. You'll want many of these poems near at hand for the next time circumstance seems set to devour you."
-Ken Babstock, Globe and Mail

— Globe and Mail

"Masterful lyrics and short narratives of great beauty by a fine poet. They are impeccable in their craft. You read them, only to go back and read them, carefully, again."
-Patrick Lane

— Patrick Lane

"I've long been a fan of Russell Thornton's expansive, exquisitely detailed, eloquently transformative poems. Whether he's writing about the sadness of Nogales prostitutes, the 'precise fury' of a father's loneliness or the longing for a certain green-eyed woman, Thornton creates breathless, sensual, hymn-like poems filled with courage and love. House Built of Rain is a beautiful book and could easily melt the hearts of stones."
-Barry Dempster

— Barry Dempster

"Throughout most of Thornton's poetry, the poet's voice is skilled, assured, mature. There is sensitivity and levity to his observations, whether of family or of sights seen on travels. ... House Built of Rain is a solid work by an accomplished and gifted observer of life, a genuine poet."
-Sally Ito, Prairie Fire

— Prairie Fire

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House Built of Rain

by Russell Thornton

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