From poems set in the eastern Mediterranean, with its abiding reverberations of the ancient Greek world, and informed by sacred sites and classical stories, to a series of sonnet responses to the Gospel story of Lazarus, to a lyric-narrative engagement with the mythic-erotic drama of the Biblical Song of Songs, to intensely personal poems that explore love and loss, this collection highlights the mystery of the interplay between inner and outer energies at the core of human experience.

Russell Thornton's books include The Fifth Window, A Tunisian Notebook, House Built of Rain (shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore, and his latest collection, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2009. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, among them Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Open Wide A Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 Anthology, and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. His poems have twice been featured on Vancouver buses as part of BC's Poetry in Transit. For several years he divided his life between Vancouver and Aberystwyth, Wales, and then Salonica, Greece. For the past number of years he has lived where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.

Russell Thornton's profile page