Birds, Metals, Stones and 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