House Built of Rain
By Russell Thornton
Harbour Publishing, 88 pages
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Russell Thornton's latest collection of poems,House Built of Rain , depicts a world of solitary moments, solitary beings, at once alone in the world yet at the same time a part of the chain of life. This simultaneous aloneness and connectedness threads throughout all the poems - the difficult, isolated childhood; the young adult's explosions; the observations of marginalized characters; nature; and death.
The poems about childhood describe a couple that married too young, and a father that became violent, beating his wife and children, and then abandoning them. Thornton effectively depicts the isolated intimacy of the mother and four young boys alone and clinging to each other:
... "Make the bus come, Mom."
She lights a cigarette Thirty seconds later, like magic,
the bus comes lumbering up. My brothers grinning outright-
and my mother's greenish eyes shining, the rain
falling into the green backyard. Me and my brothers
looking up at her, laughing, and though we don't know it, beginning
the lives we'll have, whatever happens, listening to the same rain.
"My Mother and the Rain"
The small confines of the bus stop, in the small world of the mother and children sharing their small familiar jokes, the mother's small request to listen to the rain. Thornton skillfully recounts the scene from two perspectives - the experience lived then as a child, as part of the moment, then with the distance of the adult knowing just how small that world was - a world that consisting of only them, and the rain, and then thinking of their lives as present mixed with past.
The fractured family is shown in an earlier incarnation in "The Thermos." The child, a toddler, cuts itself with a piece of an old thermos it has found. It bleeds and the child cries and they are all united, "a miracle birth" through the blood, the scream:
For a long moment, I gazed rapt
at the vivid pouring crimson.
Then I began a single scream.
Then I saw my mother running
wide-eyed toward me. Her screaming
and mine joined in a single thick
flow in the air, found my father
far away somewhere and took in
his scream without his knowing it
It was beautiful, complete.
"The Thermos"
The child whose father "... struck and struck me/for nothing I had done when I was a child" ("My Hands"), security demolished, adrift, becomes a raging young adult "Mine that hit other children/then men I would look for to hit" ("My Hands")
I was walking and hurling myself and shouting a taunt
at anyone else who might be out on the street
"Running"
The rage, the uneasiness, remains after decades - the wild boys, now ostensibly respectable adults "... smilers and jokers around a dinner table/Until something comes out after a beer or a glass of wine" ("Brothers"). After the brothers' many years and lives "Each of us knowing it is there, each of us/ready to kill it" ("Brothers").
The frenzied young man in the first half of "Running," ready to shout and fight with anyone, is years later, in the second part of the poem, hit by a car and "curled up on the road"... "calm and still." In "Owl," the poem's narrator finds "an owl lying face-up/ on a cement walkway" and wonders "How is it that it is here?" From the dead owl to the lone heron "Is it the same heron/I watched before" ("Heron"), to the angry young man to the fruit-seller "The Prophetess"), the old shipyard worker ("The St. Alice"), the singer ("Karaoke"), to "someone old, without anyone" ("Solstice Mist"), the world is comprised of lone beings. Thornton draws our attention to them.
One sudden suspended raindrop,
a lens magnifying the air at all angles,
is the silent storyteller of this place-
"Sun Shower"
In the poems about his maternal grandparents, people and nature are not separate but become one "Somehow one is my grandfather, wind and rain in his open heart./ Some how one is my grandmother, standing on a stone," ("Mouth of the Capilano River"); "the leaf-radiance will be the last of what you were" ("The Fall After You Died")
The sunlight on my face
which you will never again feel
because you have become sunlight
the wind you will never again feel
because you have become wind
"Your Last Breaths"
The poems of "House Built of Rain" feature pain and struggling and comprehension and calm. In our proudly empty "post-human" world it is refreshing to read poems that avoid the shallow noise and sensation that is present everywhere, including poetry; poems that instead exhibit empathy, a contemplative tone and restrained language. Thornton also often uses familiar markers of his local landscape (the Capilano River, harbour seals, herons, Londsdale Quay) to describe a world of creatures struggling alone. They are alone and yet there is also something there, as any North Vancouver resident knows - the rain. He asks us to listen.