Böcker av Russell Thornton

"A masterful new collection from award-winning poet Russell Thornton. With intense lyricism, Thornton records his imaginative movement between the element of water, waking to "the aloneness of water," and the phenomenon of light, comprehending "light" as "fate" and "love" as "memory of light." In the process, Thornton highlights how hard lives can manifest beauty, affirmation. A mother transcends degrading circumstances through laughter. A long-lost father's drafting set case is a "coffin," its tools a "skeleton"; his "ashes are buried" in the poet's "arm." Revelations of nature abound. Thornton's rainy locale lifts onto the mythical level, water "wrapping around" him, "holding" him "complete / as within womb water about to break." Herons' wings "span the countless characters" of a creek; a butterfly folds and unfolds "light / like white origami." A description of an ancient BC site is a rapt engagement with Indigenous petroglyphs. An exploration of a Song of Songs passage details "light ... one with turns of the yarn" of a shawl, "a touch within a touch." Classical myth informs a poem about a power outage; the speaker enters "the elsewhere of the night" to build a fire. Passionate, moving, this collection marks a fine advance in Thornton's expanding poetic output."--

A masterful new collection by Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Russell Thornton.The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familiar relationships he ushers in a connection with something transcendent: "A man has come floundering late in the night / to stand alone at the shore of a sleeping infant's face."The poems capture life at the periphery, whether describing homelessness or incarceration, or even the universal experiences of aging and mortality, love and fear of love, all of which bring the speaker into a detached yet energized state of watching and waiting: "the door that was my grandfather into our passing lives / will arrive at a house where each of us is his own door / that opens on our first selves, fundamental together."With intense lyricism, Thornton displays a mastery of craft so complete as to be nearly invisible. While stunningly beautiful, his imagery is also in such complete service to the deeper emotional resonance of each poem that it feels inevitable, making the collection deeply moving.

This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these movements arose when they did. Professor Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians following their virtual collapse.