Lately I’ve noticed that awards matter so very much to a publisher’s marketing machinations that they will claim in large-ish letters on the back of a book – “award winning” – even though, according to the smaller-font inside page bio, it’s evident that the poet has, in fact, only (gasp!) been “shortlisted” a number of times. Who the hell cares? This ploy is getting stenchy.
I’m sure if we didn’t live in a world where a “non-identity foregrounding” poet is relegated now to a much lesser spot in the pantheon, Russell Thornton would have actually WON at least one of these coveted gold stars, but also. Lacking the correct checks in the apropos boxes, he must rely on baloney claims in order to do what, sell his work? We are all so befuddled these days in the apparently paramount quest to win at capitalism, which includes the parading of gold stars and identity boxes within the machination machine. Snooze & damnation.
Thornton writes as close to the pure, eternal, classical lyric as Robinson Jeffers could ever have yearned for. There are no cheap name droppings, pop allusions or contemporary references here beyond that of nostalgia over Woolco or The Balmoral, monikers that in the context of Thornton’s poems assume the resonance of Delphic oracles. His poems engage in meditations on nature, family, place and loss in direct phrasings, essential images. One can access them without accessibility’s reductions; see them in their simplicity without slipping into the simplistic. Thornton rarely writes in traditional forms (though there is a villanelle in this collection) but his poems are always conscious of the shape they are making on the page. He obsessively riffs on the elements: light, dark, water, stones, rain, snow, heat and his family: mother, father, daughter, brothers, lifts from them, is composed by them, filters through, transcends.
A thread in this collection is the Song of Songs and pieces that resonate off lines from this Biblical text emphasizing the conversation between centuries. I prefer the poems that anchor themselves in the tangibles, less of love and more of grief and aging like Coffee Cup Stain, where a neglected ring of java turns into the parameters of mourning, Shoes, in which his mother, evacuated by a fire, realizes she’s lacking in footwear as the “cancer that she had held/in abeyance must have/relit itself, found its accelerant,/and metastasized,” the Roethke-energy of The Field where a Cormac McCarthy desolation prevails in an act of sphere-tossing with a woman in a landscape of “heaped dirt and sand, black ash,/shell holes, shell casings, flechettes” ; Ruin, on his father’s apartment spattered with a bird’s “old excrement,” its books “musty, crusted” (Thornton’s ear is often evident but subtle in its effects, never showboaty), A Corpse where his father is depicted after death as an “absent king,” his eyes “no longer blue, dark grey, stopped up as stone,” and the DH Lawrence-mode of noun-grounded image accretion in the two-parter Streets of Snow, the closest to the moment’s tenderness with pronouns and verbs dancing past, “I wrapped…you swept…you held…I reached…I touched…you lifted.”
At times, as happens with most poets, Thornton falls into the traps of his own stylistic bent and states things that seem unearned or lax, collapsing into endings that don’t feel potent like “Let the green lion/ of my love eat the sun,/be living gold,/and me be made of/ that love” (Note on My Father and Alchemy) or “there has never been anywhere/to go but the rain” (Story).
Yet, as I’ve likely said in every review I’ve done on Thornton, he’s “the real thing,” drawing always on the core of why poetry matters, to speak, within craft and its magics, of what human yearning is beyond reductionist constructs, “darkness opens, and what is being born/is far away, and I look for it.”
Marrow Reviews by Catherine Owen 