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 …” With this epigraph from Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern 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 abiding ancient cultures, and the wonder of faraway places. In scenes ranging from the Greek sun of the Peloponnese to the firs on Vancouver’s North Shore to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Thornton’s lyrics access vitality and elemental power—depicting a circular arrangement of human skulls and bones in catacombs in Peru; migrants on a night bus; a murder of crows and criminals; a conclave of shopping cart riders. Like the amphoras the poet finds in Tunisia, these poems are beautiful both for their shapely lines and for their dark emptiness, as imminently unspeakable as a Cézanne still life. At the same time, these poems bring forth intense brightness. Thornton has called the art of poetry “a conjuring and reconciling of forces—the kinetic energy of words meeting vital experience.” One might just call this poetry magic.

“Thornton has all the stigmata of one born to the calling.”

“Thornton’s work is grounded in intuitive perception, in a rich intensity of language fueled by a poetic mind steeped in intelligence and the energies of the heart. It’s a beautiful match of inner and outer worlds.”

“Masterful lyrics and short narratives of great beauty … They are impeccable in their craft. You read them, only to go back and read them, carefully, again.”

“Thornton’s poems force the unknowable to retreat.”

“Thornton’s poems establish a balance between living with one’s gaze on mortality and suffering as well as experiencing healing and regeneration through the mysterious power of love.”

“Thornton has spent over two decades building a sweeping body of work. He is a spell caster.”