Russell Thornton's ​Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025

Reviewed by ​Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

(Harbour Publishing, 2026)

​To transmute dross into gold is the power of an alchemist.
 
Through his spellbinding writing and unmatched craftsmanship, Russell Thornton continues to set an unparalleled high standard for poetry, in Canada and internationally.
 
In his new collection spanning twenty-five years of work, he weaves together a portal of tender reckoning, an almanac of divinations traversing the roads of a world superimposed with primordial images imbued with memory, myth and imagination.
 
Two Songs is a sublime, polymathic synthesis of the two drives dominating our lives: life and death. As in music, it is an interlacing of notes harmonizing beginnings and endings as sacred segments within the infinite octave loop of eternity. His poetry is a grand virtuoso symphony, each poem a song in a masterpiece expounding the inexplicable “all” of existence.
 
In reading Russell Thornton’s poetry I am transported to the holy ground of his all-encompassing poetic mind to experience the world as an integral essence of myself.
 
There is an energy in his verses, a living current animating everything, breathing life into it and, more profoundly, blurring separation between forms. Each object, each living thing is equivalent to everything else in a seamless, boundless reality where inner and outer worlds merge; where the past is now and our future selves are reconciled to the present moment through quantum windings of the heart, giving a sense of wonder and significance to the most menial bits of concreteness, those emptiness-filled, atomic components of ourselves and the universe.
 
In the poem “One Morning,” one of the most profound and summative pieces of his ethos, the poet writes:

​If you remember anything now, it is the morning
and what you see around you—green grass, trees, rocks, rain,
at any instant a step away from light—and your life
a courtesy to you halfway between an atom and a star.

​I will never forget those lines. So too in the poem “A Hummingbird in That Second,” which in itself is a stroke of poetic genius, we read:

In that second, the hummingbird
is a green electron in two places simultaneously,
a glass of green liquor brewed millennia ago,
a miniature green time machine,
a fistful of purple-green air before thunder
 
...
 
beating its wings two hundred and sixteen times,
the sum of the numerical values
of the letters in the seventy-two hidden names of God,
the code for the first matter, the mist
sweeping around it, in that second.

​The poet leads us to the mystery of journeys that words carve out of nothingness. As if flashlights in the darkness of the inexplicable unknown, his verses give shape and meaning to what we ourselves have been struggling to foresee and name. He transcends the cerebral irony hailed in our present Canadian canon, returning poetry to its rightful place: that perfect fusion of intellect, heart and the mysteries of the spirit:

​And how your life is a chance you will lose
to touch forever a person who will grow old and die,
and how it will turn you to the words you most want to say
and do not know and know they are secret

​Reading these verses, I am inundated with a sense of reverence for life and reality: the knowing that the eternal particles of the universal essence are forever shifting, collapsing, regrouping in different forms, and that it is OK to die, for we will live on as light and stone and grass and prayer.
 
As in Whitman’s, Yeats’ and Blake’s sweeping poetry, we encounter infinity’s grand repeating design holding our own life segment momentarily within the musical sequence of the eternal. In the poem “The Function of The Purest Grass” we read: 

​The sad singer, the murderer, the lover
who is the bright eradicating one—they pass like grass.
The shiver, the loss, the comfort moving deep
through the flesh, the trespass that opens its abyss-
transpire like the wavings of grass.
And the war beginning and the war over
 
and the dance of uncanny joy through the streets-
happen while sorrow grows like grass.
Grows more and more pure and more and more vast.
And remains- it flies free, returns, remains. And might remain,
the prayer inside prayers, when everything
we know, including grass, is gone. 

​In the poem “Night Tide”, as in most poems in this collection, dream images and mystery fuse with reality. Without the clumsiness of overt similes, a tide becomes grasses, then sand dunes, then the rhythms of the body: 

I thought, as a tide surged and swung to shore, 
so a body moved; as a body, so a soul in miracle windings.

The poems in Two Songs are filled with that magic I have always dreamed of. The poet’s voice becomes a conduit for the unmistakable universal voice of poetry, through the ages, through canons, through the resounding verses of the greatest bards.
 
In the poem “Thessaloniki Train Station”, a man, perhaps homeless or mentally ill, speaks to everyone in different languages. He is one of the iconic characters the poet paints for us: dream-like, unforgettable, unknown, yet recognizable, archetypal, as if he had always existed in our own psyche as part of our subconscious. Indeed, a thread runs through this poetic world: a prototypical man in different guises, as in the poetry of Borges, a quintessential man:

​And all had their ideas about who and what the man was
 
 
the different parts of whatever he called himself
were flying out in a hundred directions,
he was a wildly flashing switchboard,
he was the king bagman of the world,
 
 
and sputtering out language after language,
he was the living ramshackle of the tower of Babel
 
 
calling out to the ones who to him seemed confused,
though they also seemed certain where they were going.

​In “A Tunisian Notebook”, we walk along with the poet through “the maze of narrow streets in the old city— / bazaar in which time bargains with eternity.”  Reality within reality is changed and shaped by observation to redefine our self-concept, as in the poem “The Shepherd and the Nymph,” each person a shepherd inebriated with enthusiasm and ecstasy, “an animal full of God” … “having in his solitude become pure.”
 
Also, in “Memory of a Deer,” the observed is ourselves. The poet experiences himself as the deer who is like a child, and there is an all-encompassing empathy with the other being, a oneness with no divide, the same life force coursing through everything. The light within the poet is the deer and the deer is a vision of the deer. There is so much beauty, pain and instinct in this poem: reverence for all life and palpable loss of connection to family, to tribes, herds and natural habitats both for wildlife and humans.
 
In the poem “Creek Trout,” like the trout, the poet can “feel the length of the creek … each chamber flowing through the other … a new entering and entering … in which he is a rider of a single journeying pulse.”
 
I love the poem “Lemon Groves” and how it leads from “the horizon a burnt-out eye socket” and “the sea, a throng of mouths wounding themselves against sand” to “the light of the lemon” in a lemon grove that offers shade and sanctuary, the properties of the lemon itself re-energizing the mental state of the poet with all its purifying and healing effects.
 
Everything is alive in this poetry. A vale is a living entity; so too a mountain. The world is alive and limitless. Everything is conscious: “the light, the vegetation, the rock / so bright, so mysteriously exact / are a moving stillness about to speak.”
 
I was captivated by the artistry in the poem “Foot of St. Georges Avenue.”  So powerful! So exceptionally unique in imagery and metaphor. It packs so much from the initial description of trains in the rail yard to a little boy’s memory of needing his absent father’s help to fix his little toy train and to put his life back on track; to shooting drugs like “slamming boxcars into a vein;” to a dangerous sleep feared for a potential non-return to daylight; to the pronouncement of the last stanza, that “What you dream … is the beginning of the day you will wake to— / a world assembling itself, both workshop and toy,/ a Christ entering metal, never to return.”
 
The poems in this collection stem from a deep love for life, people and places. Indelible heart bonds hold together time and space. To love is to nurture and safekeep, yet simultaneously to grieve with the awareness that death is part and parcel with living. Though we wish to stay with our children, our parents, our grandparents, our lovers and everyone we cherish as they are now, and as we are now, time will pass and we will lose each other. In lines reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay," we read: 

​I would like us to stay as we are now
within the flowering and flowing gold
gaze of the sun’s late rays. And suddenly
I imagine a day when she is old.
As if I were her child and she was soon
to be gone, I begin to grieve for her,
little mother, my daughter. Carrying
her shepherdess's bag filled with her stones,
one for each sheep in her flock, already
she is keeping count for when it is night
and she brings the sheep into the stone fold

​Also, in “Ambleside Beach”, a passionate sensibility merges inner and outer realities into one breathing, living entity:

​I go out and back, I go out and back,
riding my heart and the tide, and the sea
cups me beneath the high sun’s deep dazzle.
I remember when I was very young
my grandmother held my face in her hands.
 
...
 
 
I swim out to see myself cup my child’s
face in my hands and feel for a moment
my grandmother is there as a small girl.
I look straight up, I hear myself saying,
“Never leave me,” the sun pouring ashes
and the sea washing them across my eyes.

​In “Stopping the Waves,” ocean waves transform into gravitational waves rippling “through the space-time of the universe to the earthly now.” The poet’s young son is building a contraption of sticks to trap the waves. For the “Little unknown man here on the shore,” the trap is a “shelter,” and the shelter is a trap, and “He is collecting scattered pieces / of himself as he finds them along the beach… though the waves will bring down almost all the wood and depart.” 
 
From the personal and the specific, the poems in Two Songs gather and expand the meaning of existence. They lead us on a profound mystical journey of words through life. Surreality, archetypal unity of the self with the field of all creation. These poems rise above the metacognitive. They deconstruct reality and reassemble it through association of divergent, often paradoxical images and concepts, synthesizing the Dionysian into a cohesively crafted, Apollonian plenitude.
 
The poet transcends spatio-temporality by pairing several affinities, as in the poem “Paralia”: “the crazed Greek chorus of honking horns” makes the street traffic scene iconically mythical. In reading, we time travel from past to present to future through words and imagination. Along with the poet, in reading we become “Spies,” pure receptive awareness of the ineffable, for everything is nothing, yet seems so solid and so real. We can never truly even know ourselves except for what we see or what we believe we see. We are a mystery to ourselves and to others—mirrors of mirrors of light, naming.
 
Russell Thornton is a poet who has brought poetry back to its rightful place. He summons back amidst us the carver, God, creator of forms, the magic of light. He is an all-seeing and observing mind, not only cataloguing the world, but breathing life back into it, reconstituting the heart, soul and humanity too often missing in contemporary writing.
 
I would like to end with some thoughts on the poem “Coyote,” the wild soul animal who cannot meander beyond the fences of his world. The poet accompanies his little daughter to school, though he too, like the coyote, cannot enter the school to share in her day and life. As in the final barrier between realms encountered in near-death experiences, the poet writes: “I have come to a dark barrier beyond which I cannot go.” Reminiscent of God reaching out for his offspring’s hand in Michelangelo’s painting “The Creation of Adam”, the poet who had driven away as if “never to come back”, devotedly and out of the binding power of love returns to pick up his child from school. In one of the most stirring and memorable lines in this stunning poetry book we read: 

​At three o’clock, I will come to the edge of the playground
to wait for the quick touch of your small hand.

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​Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews has written several collections of poetry and two non-fiction books. Her work appears in various journals and anthologies, including Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, Descant, The Canada Literary Review, Acta Victoriana, Canadian Poetry Review, The Blue Nib and Lothlorien, among others. Her poetry won first prize in the 2023 International Poetry Prize in Rome’s Antonio De Ferraris contest. Her poem “The First Time I Heard Leonard Cohen'' was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her latest book of poems, A Nomenclature for Light, was released September 2025 by Mosaic Press. Josie is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Poetry Society, the Italian Canadian Writers Association and The Heliconian Club for Women in the Literary Arts. She teaches workshops for Poetry in Voice and is the host & coordinator of The Oakville Literary Cafe series.