Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000–2025

Russell Thornton—a Canadian poet in the tradition of Irving Layton, Earle Birney, and Gwendolyn MacEwen—celebrates the fierce mysteries of life in these lyrics of love, loss, and metamorphosis.

“Life and Death were songs, his mind the singing bird.” With this epigraph from Nikos Kazantakis’ Odyssey: A Sequel, Thornton introduces his own tightly woven life-death songs as he has practiced them over twenty-five years. His themes are nature’s beautiful din, the love and violence of families, the serious smile of archaic cultures, and the wonder of far away places. In scenes ranging from the Greek sun of Larissa to the firs on Vancouver’s North Shore and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Thornton’s lyrics give voice to the vitality and elemental power in common things—a circle of bones; migrants on a night bus; a murder of crows and criminals, cawing and clawing; a conclave of shopping cart riders. Like the amphoras the poet finds in Tunisia, these poems are beautiful both for their shapely words and lines and for their dark emptiness, as imminently unspeakable as a Cezanne still life. Thornton has called the art of poetry “a conjuring and reconciling of forces—the kinetic energy of words meeting vital experience.” Or one might just call it magic.