The Human Shore.

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
author of No Greater Love, her sixth collection of poetry.

Russell Thornton’s poems cover a wide range of topics, but he writes less about things and events and more about how things are connected, and the deep undercurrents existing between the animate and the inanimate. For example, a mountain “is a person / containing all the experience we can ever have.” And fire “becomes a thing, and remembers….”

Nothing is obvious here; the poems must be probed for their meaning. Sometimes that meaning will be elusive, but once revealed it will satisfy. The poet writes about a worm in an apple, and we know this is a metaphor for something. He searches for his father in a river’s gravel bed, and talks about a childhood experience at a railway yard, where we are left to wonder if this is real or a toy. His “Window Curtains Half Drawn” subtly illustrates how things can be veiled and yet seen.

Thornton is at his best when describing actual incidents, such as a couple dying in a mudslide, or a woman making blackberry wine, or his grandfather getting a haircut in the nursing home. My personal favourite, and possibly the best poem in the book, is “The Suspect,” in which he is in a lineup of crime suspects, and is actually hoping he will be identified as the perpetrator in order to establish a relationship with the female complainant. There are also some very striking poems about Gypsies, an extremely disturbing one about rats, and an anecdote about a taxi driver transporting a prostitute and her pimp. Gritty stuff. Recommended for mature readers who can keep their brains focused and have the patience to devote the time and energy these poems deserve.