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list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Sep 2018
ISBN:9781550178449
publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

The Broken Face

by Russell Thornton

tagged: canadian, family
Description

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.

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.

Editorial Review

“Russell Thornton’s The Broken Face demonstrates an admirable versatility of variation in form, line length, imagery, and subject matter.”

— The Ormsby Review

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