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

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.

Russell Thornton's profile page

• Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
• Short-listed, Raymond Souster Award
• Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry

Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain

The poet artfully carries the reader into his world as he explores the themes of the value and inevitability of forgetting; time as it is reflected in the lives of our parents, children and grandparents; and what the natural world can teach us. Moving from the tender retelling of a grandparent’s last moments to the barely contained rage and violence between fathers and sons, we are brought into a way of seeing common things anew. A careful reader is rewarded with insights into the simple pleasures of watching men work, a child making sense of the world and the perfection of the natural world. Combining biblical and Haida mythical references in seamless ways and observing cormorants and deer in literal and figurative ways provide surprising connections for readers and demonstrate useful writing skills for students.

The poet has received The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize for best poem.