Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain

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

Author: Russell Thornton
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Published: 03/27/2013
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781550176018


Award: Governor General's Literary Awards - Finalist

About the Author
Thornton, Russell: - Russell Thornton's books include The Fifth Window, A Tunisian Notebook, House Built of Rain (shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore, and his latest collection, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2009. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, among them Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Open Wide A Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 Anthology, and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. His poems have twice been featured on Vancouver buses as part of BC's Poetry in Transit. For several years he divided his life between Vancouver and Aberystwyth, Wales, and then Salonica, Greece. For the past number of years he has lived where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.