Russell Thornton

Russell Thornton is a North Vancouver, B.C. poet who has lived in Montreal, in Aberystwyth, Wales, and in Larissa and Thessaloniki, Greece.

He won first prize in the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 for "The Beginnings of Stars." He has also had poems chosen in Arc's "Poem of the Year" contest in the "Editor's Choice" and "Honourable Mention" categories (1998 and 2002), and in The Fiddlehead's "The Fiddlehead Contest" in the "Honourable Mention" category (1997).

His poems are included in a number of anthologies of Canadian poetry, including Vintage 95, 96, and 97/98 (Quarry Press), The Edges of Time (Seraphim Editions, 1999), and Vintage 2000 (Ronsdale Press 2000). Some of his poems appear in Greek translation in the anthologies Foreign Language Poems on Thessaloniki (Kedros Publishers, Athens, 1997), Into a Foreign Tongue Goes Our Grief: Poems On or After Cavafy (Bilieto Publishers, Peania, 2000), and Thessalonki: A City in Literature (Metaixmio Publishers, Athens, 2002).

In addition to A Tunisian Notebook, Thornton is the author of several books and chapbooks, among them The Accurate Earth (Reference West chapbook series, Victoria, 1997), The Fifth Window (Thistledown Press, 2000), and House Built of Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2003), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in the B.C. Book Prizes, 2004.

His conversation with Patrick Lane is included in the collection of talks between the newer generation of Canadian poets and the older generation of well established poets, Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2002).

The League of Canadian Poets

Poem from A Tunisian Notebook

The Beginnings of Stars

The late sun burning close, and slow waves coming in --
the sea's mysterious lit wine of touch
on the sand, slipping away glittering
in scattered glasslike grains for an instant,
and returning again; if we belong
to each other, we belong to that touch.
Then suddenly the sun is gone; the sky
is a dark purple darkening to black.
Those sky deities appear, those bright ones
inexorably performing their fixed
and millennia-old roles said to rule a life --
glints, coruscations, crushed glare-origins
within abundant rich clusters of grapes
spreading throughout the night's summer vineyard.
There are the never-beheld-before stars,
we wish we could say rightly and at last,
when we know even the closest we see
had to have been born more than long ago,
and the farthest born and died before that.
But since the light is the way we see light,
it must be travelling in a heaven
of more than our memory will allow,
where we ourselves might see how no person
or thing or love is ever gone, but visible,
and forever new, in light, and in us,
where light is always turning, flower-like,
opening and closing and opening.
We build a fire which will repeat at night
what the sun did during the day; the sparks
fly off and disappear the way the stars
will seem to disappear tomorrow in the sun.
The body is the wine-flask and the wine;
the lover is the veil on the beloved's face.
And what we hide within, and hides from us
through all our hours of light, seems dark, and yet,
now in the dark as in the one centre
of the fusions that are stars, is pure time,
when the bodies we are wake in their day,
and we taste that day's wine, that endless beginning
of nameless fate, when we give ourselves up
to our lives, and enter another life.

© Russell Thorton

Excerpts from Reviews of A Tunisian Notebook

"[Thornton] is an observer of deep time, with the language skills to back that up."
~ John Degen, Poetry Spoken Here Webstore

"The strength of A Tunisian Notebook is that it somehow manages to impart inexpressible experience with a lyric souvenir we can keep for posterity."
~ Matt MacLennan, Vallum Magazine

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