Russell Thornton
Biography
Russell Thornton is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Hundred Lives (2014), which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Raymond Souster Award. His other titles are The Fifth Window (2000), A Tunisian Notebook (2002), House Built of Rain (2003), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award, The Human Shore (2006), The Broken Face (2018), and Answer to Blue (2021). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies, among them Best Canadian Poetry (2012 and 2019) and has been selected several times for BC’s Poetry in Transit. He is one of the poets whose conversation and poetry is featured in What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (2018). His poetry has appeared in translation in anthologies and literary journals in Greece, Romania, and Israel. Thornton lives in North Vancouver, BC.
Poetics Statement
“I think poets breathe the air of the poets alive around them as well as those that have come before. It’s inevitable that a poet’s pieces are filled with echoes of other poets, obvious or subtle. I’d say that in a way all poets are part and parcel of a single composite anonymous poet. I think the irony is that this “poet” is alone. And I think the natural state of individual mortal poets both is and isn’t one of aloneness. Most monumental artistic human expression is for me a cry or wail or howl of aloneness, an address to whatever is out there, or in there—and is other, totally other than ourselves. I think the creative cry announces our essential aloneness. But it’s an ecstatic aloneness. Love, imagination, can give us flashes of an experience of not being alone, and can create for us sites of recognition: of full awareness of another person, of invisible realities, of the levels of love. But even in those flashes, what we’re aware of is aloneness infinitely wider than our own. That other aloneness is lonely for us, and we’re lonely for it. And so, the way I see it, we’re searchers; we’re always searching for what is searching for us. The instant we’re not alone, however—the instant we find and are found—we’re not what we were, we’re unfamiliar to ourselves, we’re someone or something else, we’re other, we’re not there. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Open
Everywhere: Open, Open. Stores, banks. Stores, banks.
Gas stations. Open, Open Later, Open.
For as long as I can remember, I have thought about stealing.
Once I scoped out and robbed the Number Five Orange.
The storage cellar had a steel hatch at ground level
with an easily removable commercial padlock.
I shimmied down through the small square opening
and with the city police station a block away,
in perfect calm I hoisted cases of beer to an accomplice.
In the weeks after, I got drunk many times for free.
My most professionally carried out act of crime gone unnoticed,
I could not help it, I gave in, I told people—
drinking at the St. Alice in North Van,
bragging about the great cache in my car,
I ended up on the Capilano Reserve,
and I and two old school friends shared the last of the Labatts.
Out in the river in the dark, we gaffed coho,
laughing as we arrested pilgrim after silver pilgrim
beginning its ascent to the top of the canyon to spawn and die.
The tide was coming in, sea and river water
moving together, wrapping around me
where I stood in pants and shoes swaying, tottering. We gaffed.
We chucked salmon into the now empty trunk.
I would take it home and eat it. They would take it home
and eat it, or sell it. We gaffed. The oncoming wild eyes
of the fish staring straight into the first rays of the late summer sun.
The angled mouths of the fish, the blackness: Open, Open.
Aluminum Beds
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds
into the house to replace our camp cots,
we see the dark in a metal’s dull sheen
is the dark displayed in his beard. The sound
rushing through the hollows of the square posts,
the frames, guards, and rails, is the sound rushing
through the spaces he has made within us.
He sets them down, the pieces he measured,
sheared, and welded together that weekend
in his father’s factory, while I, half-hidden
in among the machines, gathered up scrap
fallen to the cement floor. The four beds
stand in our shared room, one for each of us—
with this he fulfills his unwanted office.
He leaves us soon after, and I keep vigil.
Nightly without fail in the years that follow
I allow not one of my three brothers
to speak or even audibly breathe. I know
that the sound of any of our young voices
will distract the light trying to make its way
through the fitted substance of the metal. I know,
at the same time, that this light is my father
searching for his sons. He does not know it—
long before he left us, his love began travelling
to us apart from him. If I memorize him,
I will be able to see the love. If I cut
from myself all that is not my love for him,
the right set of rays will find us. My brothers
fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait
for my dream. There is no space not swirling,
no fire with its core of blackness not burning,
within the beds’ angular emptiness
because of the love meant for us. Through the night,
the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,
unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,
the light of my father’s love arrived at last.
When the Whales Return
They are reporting that orcas have been sighted
swimming into the inlet for the first time in eighty years—
a mother and her four young, the baby fins visible
alongside the mother’s, the five of them rolling and jumping
and spuming and puffing after the big breaths,
breaching in and out of the deep, dark-blue waters,
following the whale ways of quietness opening now
as a pandemic halts ship traffic up and down the coast.
A week ago, my mother went her own way alone into the silence
and is all around me but beyond anyone’s call,
where her spirit’s sonar must be sending out signals
that bounce back to her to tell her where she is going
but from beyond what I know as hearing or distance.
The orcas on their long, echoing ocean paths
bring with them the silences they pass through,
they come now into the harbour and along the shoreline
at the bottom of the avenue where my mother would walk
with me in her womb, a girl carrying a tiny heartbeat
that had joined her own in the space she discovered inside her,
the way cleared for her because of her twirling joy.
Like the orcas that have never swum here before
but have found their way, she found her way in her life
through the mysterious silence she knew was love.
Those moments when love arrived and moved within her,
and took her up in its ceaseless play and led her,
were the moments when she was most herself
through her eighty years. Now that she is gone,
and the world is locked down, it must still be leading her.
It was right that she died as the city streets began
to go quiet and the ocean began to go quiet.
There was always a silence within my spinning,
laughing mother when she was happiest—
almost hypnotizing her, making her say that she wished
everything would stop, stay exactly as it was forever,
as it stops now and allows great silences to arise and travel
from the ocean into the inlet under bridges, past skyscrapers,
and roll alongside the shoreline when the whales return.