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Enlarge Cover
list price: $16.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Oct 2006
ISBN:9781550173857
publisher:
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Description
The Human Shore is an accomplished collection of poems both grittily real and spiritual, the follow-up to Russell Thornton's critically acclaimed House Built of Rain. Whether describing a tidal wave, a train yard, or the ravaging effects of a wildfire, Thornton's work is arresting and masterful. The poet covers a wide variety of places and subjects, including a woman and her child in Thessaloniki, rats in a basement, a BC river "grind[ing] mountains down to tears" and catacombs in Lima, where "human corpses were bulldozed / tumbling over and under one another like adult rag dolls."
Barry Dempster has called Thornton's poems "expansive, exquisitely detailed, eloquently transformative" and Patrick Lane deems them "impeccable in their craft." By turns elegant and shocking--and often both at once--The Human Shore, promises to leave an indelible mark on Canadian poetry.
Editorial Reviews
"Thornton often shows a Bishop-like attention to detail, giving painstaking descriptions of the object or site in question and of the precise circumstances and manner of his encounter with it. These poems, that is, ground us so firmly in the physical world that their excursions into more metaphysical realms feel not so much like flights from reality as deeper explorations of its essence."
-Malcolm Woodland, University of Toronto Quarterly
— UofT Quarterly
"Russell Thornton gently invites his readers to follow him through places like empty piers, backseats of taxicabs, boxcars, and a basement full of rats with his latest collection of poetry, The Human Shore. Thornton's work explodes over each page with beautiful metaphors and images. His writing style is one that demands attention from his reader, and rightfully so, because no reader could afford to overlook any aspect of Thornton's work. There is balance in his poetry and an understanding of people and lifestyles that usually get tucked away from public eye, such as drugs and sex-trade workers. ... Thornton's work is real, spiritual and reads like a friend writing a heartfelt letters that only you will read. I highly recommend Russell Thornton's The Human Shore to all the poetry readers out there who are interested in a book that will be read cover-to-cover many times. ... 5 out of 5."
--Taryn Hubbard, JIVE Magazine
— JIVE
