The Fifth Window

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Russell Thornton spins symbols within symbols, metaphors within
metaphors, in his seventh collection of poetry. We find “an eye
creating an eye deep / within an eye,” for instance, or “multitudes
of ferns, / and the foliage each fern’s frond held out / arranged in
rows of other minute whole ferns, like a code.”

The effect of such repetition is varied. It is, in some instances,
monotonous, but elsewhere becomes both rhythmic and transcendent: in
“The Monasteries of the Air,” Thornton writes, “I hear what I
heard within the quiet / the first moment I stood here / without telling
myself I heard it.” But there is more than mere repetition going on.
Thornton sets his pieces in North Vancouver, where he now lives, and in
Greece, where he has lived, and expertly captures the landscapes and the
smells, the rituals and the people of these places. The poems combine
interior feelings with sensuality, and even occasionally manage to blend
sensual images together, as in the poem “The Musk,” where we read:
“leaving the sound of the blossoms floating to grass, / the air’s
vibration fragrant, a sound I inhaled.”