‘The world arriving / and departing’

Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025 
by Russell Thornton 

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2026

$26.96 / 9781998526574

Reviewed by gillian harding-russell

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With an epigraph from Nikos Kazantzakis Odysseus: A Modern Sequel, Russell Thornton’sTwo Songs encompasses life and death with their intricate intertwining in poems or “songs.” In keeping with this duality that finds echoes in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s work, Thornton’s imagery works through dichotomies of light and dark, water and fire or earth. The latter pairings often draw Thornton’s attention, sometimes in the form of Vancouver’s North Shore and rain or as dust or fire’s aftermath, ashes. Thornton’s line is long and limber and elegant as it moves through enjambments to open up fresh images with their startling or beautiful turns of thought. As well as a cadence that choreographs the flow of thoughts, a hallmark of Thornton’s poetry is its “music of imagery”—to borrow T.S Eliot’s term—that speaks with its own charged language.

In the opening dream poem, “Night Tide,” we may intuit a lover or muse in this scene with the poet in the presence of the ocean. In evocation of the flash of foaming breakers, the lines move through a “dream dark” setting, to a “petal” that “broke continually / into cold white flame but was not consumed.” In the following lines, an old woman (an inn keeper?) speaks, “We are all leaving,” she says, and the speaker replies, “I know, I’ll be ready.” So, indeed, poets and lovers as well as old women are subsumed by their mortality and what must follow.

Thornton’s vision is by turns spiritual and carnal and mysterious in this poem, but another more mundane and raw human thread underpins the poems about his boyhood and adulthood. In “My Mother in the Rain,” he is drawn by his mother’s “greenish” eyes and believes she makes the bus arrive; and in “Woolco” he and his brothers in shifting for themselves while his mother works at the Red Grill get into mischief. In a poem such as “Brothers” we note the scar that their vagrant, often violent father has left on his sons even though all three are now “clean-living,” and “Great with Tigers,” a sensual poem centred on the scent of a woman’s menstruation, perhaps reflects an Irving Layton’s influence that the poet acknowledges. Altogether, Two Songs is a dynamic collection that offers an epic journey through the poet’s psyche over a lifetime. 

One of the most powerful poems (from Fifth Window [2000]) is “Memory of a Deer,” in which the personality of the poet at his most vulnerable and strong is reflected. When he comes across a deer that had wandered down from the mountains and made its way into an underground parking lot, “like a child / caught doing something wrong,” the speaker remembers stories of deer swimming the North Van mile-wide inlet but unable to pull themselves up onto the wharf. He then recalls his own experience with memory of that underground deer, as he once “desperate and dazed,” “pushed [himself] into the inlet” “with the intention of swimming out / farther than [he] could swim back,” but he did indeed return with “no need to know why,” both “weeping and laughing”: 

Then, the memory must have been
just a pinpoint hidden in my body,
but a light that would begin to burn
and lead me without my knowing it.

Later the “light” associated with that deer memory, becomes in the poet’s mind “a vision of a deer” with its “strong, delicate-looking head,” but, unlike the deer that had to be rescued by wharf workers, the one in the poet’s vision “flexed haunches” and “lifted itself on a wharf” and ran through the city to find “a forest and sacred herd.” 

Another beautiful poem, “When the Whales Return,” is written a week after his mother’s death and after news that the orcas had been reported swimming in the inlet. While the orcas bring “their long echoing ocean paths” into “the silences they pass through,” the speaker arrives at a vision of his mother, “a girl carrying a tiny heartbeat / that had joined her own in the space she discovered inside her”:  

The way cleared for her because of her twirling joy.
Like the orcas that have never swum here before
but have found their way, she found her way in her life  
through the mysterious silence she knew was love.

The poet concludes that “there was always a silence within my spinning,/laughing mother when she was happiest—”. She wished “everything would stop” and “stay exactly as it was forever,” and so the poet associates her passing into the “great silences” where she has never gone before with the whales’ unprecedented entry into the inlet. 

In this poem, a portrait of his father whose “beard,” described as “Biblical,” “began as moustache” that his teenage son emulated, also growing a beard as soon as he could, evolves into a piece of artistry while the son recognizes his father’s prowess in his blacksmith-like workmanship. Like Wayland the Smith from Norse and Germanic legend who lives apart from society, his father lives an estranged existence on a “floating island” after he is led astray by alcohol and drugs:

I do not remember ever having touched my father,
or him touching me except to strike me, but now I touched his beard.
It was the beard that had begun when I was small,

and continued through the phases of his life,
and was now like a cathedral window screen or domestic grille,
or portal of intricate design. I could not stop there. I touched his face.

In touching his father’s face, the poet remarks, it was as if “my hand met flesh of the first human dead.”  Although in touching his face, the “beard remained his”—“the ironwork” and “artistry” were complete—they were as “ore” “leading back” “to every beginning in the dark earth.” Through this poem, a kind of respect and understanding of his father, in place of reconciliation, perhaps, takes the place of love.

Another poignant poem that builds on time and memory, reconstructed or otherwise, “Two-tone Ring” begins with the speaker imagining that he hears a “two-tone ring” while sitting on a bench, “not at an airport” though the airport setting comes into play later in the poem. The ring reminds him of a cellphone alert or keys left in the car’s ignition, but instead he finds himself envisioning his deceased grandparents whose wedding, he calculates, was ninety years ago on that day. The poet tries to explain the wildfire smoke and climate change to his grandparents, but worries they are too far away to hear. Again, he hears a “two-tone ring,” as at an airport where he is summoned “to check all [his] random / and ultimate affections” and is called to a self-reckoning and appreciation of the world he finds himself inside:

Stand at the wedding
of my temporary eyes
and the world arriving
and departing and arriving
before and after my eyes,
present my ID
for my travel from here to here.

As so often in Thornton’s poems, shifting scenarios create layers of meaning for understanding. That the poet’s travel is not “from here to there” but instead “from here to here” points to the oneness of time and place amid all the notable and sometimes painful changes where love can provide a centre that holds.

Reading these poems that span twenty-five years was to me like travelling through the poet’s mind and psyche. In selecting the poems I have chosen, I wonder about the many outstanding poems I have not room to mention. Two Songs is a remarkable oeuvre that includes poems of great beauty that intertwine light and dark, fire and water and earth and dust or ashes, and all these poems so magnificently held together by love.

[Editor’s note: Along with three other authors (Elizabeth Bachinsky, Renee Saklikar, Aaron Cully Drake), Russell Thornton will participate in the ‘Harbour & Nightwood Multi-Book Launch‘ at the Irish Heather in Vancouver on April 22. Doors open at 6:30.]

A Saskatchewan poet, editor, and, reviewer, gillian harding-russell has five poetry collections. A chapbook, A Handle on Things, will be published in 2026. Also, a poem appears in the environmental anthology Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice, edited by Yvonne Blomer, and a couple are upcoming in Queen’s Quarterly and Transition. Her work has been published widely in literary journals across Canada. [Editor’s note: gillian has written about collections by Steffi Tad-y, Pamela Porter Svetlana Ischenko, Donna Kane, Diana Hayes, Susan McCaslin, Marlene Grand Maître, and Ian Thomas in BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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