Jessica Lee McMillan : The White Light of Tomorrow, by Russell Thornton

The White Light of Tomorrow, Russell Thornton
Harbour Publishing, 2023

 

 

 

Russell Thornton's timeless, lyric poetry is even more emotionally resonant and visually intense in his latest collection, The White Light of Tomorrow. Seeking beginnings in endings on a cyclical journey like Roethke’s "The Far Field," from where this collection draws its title, Thornton continues his poetics of transmuting matter and spirit where: "Light and rock meet, and rock flows like water/ through designs it finds and loses again.(13) Part memoir and part metaphysics, Thornton gives us his characteristically burning, haunted signatures of myth and archetype through the elements, but also through unexpected sources such as a metal sink, an answering machine and a corpse. The collection's long poem, “The Sea Wolf in the Stone" moves from the image of a "ragged man" urinating by a forest highway to scattered needles in a cave in the hills, then takes Blakean leaps from a petroglyph. The lines of the carving expand to "pictures forming in the air" and direct him through water and light back again to the trees and stone. In "The Draftsman's Wound" his father's compass set is likened to a coffin of bones and draws "circle upon circle within itself". These poems teach us lines and circles are not Plutonic forms, nor intellectual exercises, but "a diagram of trance swirls"—desire lines of a passionate, poetic voice.

The most emotionally impactful poems focus on Thornton's troubled relationship with his father who he calls "my absent king". "A Coat" is a particularly devastating narrative where the coat is an "unintentional gift" imbued with his father's DNA, as well as a costume where he "learned earliest how inheritance meant prison stripes". In "My Fathers Beard" the beard doubles as ironwork, as a biblical analog of father and son, as well as "ore transformed...yet leading back again to every beginning in the dark earth."

Thornton grounds us throughout the collection via historical Vancouver sites, including the Balmoral Hotel, The Fraser Arms, and Woolco. As with Thornton's childhood poems in this collection, the Vancouver poems are often more unsettling than nostalgic. They serve as a counterpoint to the sublime digressions responding to Song of Songs, such as Shulamite’s aura in "Description" or the white light of the garment in "Shawl". Like Thornton's previous work, vitality endlessly shifts through matter and through us. But in this collection, there is an even keener sense of how imperfect our lives are; how we are fallible vessels, limited by addiction, class and inescapable mortality.

The White Light of Tomorrow also hones in on temporal themes of aging, the anthropocene and facing death. "Blackouts" is a like a brush with death but with the paradoxical revelation that light has to move through darkness. Similarly striking is the observation that “light is beauty and why we live our life in arrears". Meditations on death feel more contemporary and relevant to our epoch in this collection. "Peter's Ice Cream" and "Summer Morning" take us to the immediacy of climate crisis and "Power" admits in Thornton's alternate, matter-of-fact voice: "I can't help it; I think this is it."

Thornton's world, however, does not mire in endings because of its cyclical motion. His poetic receptiveness to moments of consummation along the circle is present in this collection's refrain of "gathering distances". The white light closes distances. It is the beginning in the end. In poems like "Voice", the world collapses into a superposition where Thornton observes "rain whispering in my wrist". Then the circle widens in poems like "Shoes" observing "a conflagration widened from its point of origin".

Thornton's singular villanelle in the collection, "A Dance", is particularly suited to his syntax, which is like an alchemic equation of energies reassigned to different variables: A is B is C is.... The domestic scene of a lover in a doorway is a burning apparition. In "Play Structure", the playground exists on multiple planes—it "is a molecule of children" where light itself "assigns roles in a numberless cast". Humanity has little autonomy in this metaphysics, which does not succumb to apocalyptic helplessness but rather awe. In The White Light of Tomorrow, autonomy itself is the inferior myth because a thing is more than itself and not itself forever. But despite the "trance swirls", we never get lost because Thornton never abandons the tangible image. And his images relate to each other more like syllogism than complicated metaphor.

In "The Prophecy" Thornton concludes "I see my task must be to wait and fall away/ in the honey of the moment...", suggesting the same poetic attention of the windswept reader. For us, "Story" imparts why we must surrender to the shimmering moments in the counterpoise of light and dark, desire and loss because:

Whatever heaven we dreamt
spends its energy
along with whatever life we ruined,
as high as any riverside
and as low as any riverbed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Lee McMillan is poet, essayist and civil servant with an English MA and Certificate in Creative Writing from The Writer’s Studio (SFU). Her writing has appeared in over 30 publications across Canada and the US, including The Humber Literary Review, Train Poetry Journal, Pinhole Poetry, GAP RIOT Press, Blank Spaces, Rogue Agent Journal and Rose Garden Press (forthcoming). Jessica is completing her first poetry collection. She lives on the unceded traditional territories of Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (New Westminster, BC) with her little family and large dog. More at: jessicaleemcmillan.com.

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Donna Kane

Orrery, Donna Kane
Harbour Publishing, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Donna Kane, a recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture and an honorary Associate of Arts degree from Northern Lights College, is the current executive director of the Peace Laird Regional Arts Council and co-founder of Writing on the Ridge (a non-profit society that has, for over twenty years, organized arts festivals, literary readings, artist retreats and writer-in-residence programs). Her work has appeared in journals and magazines across Canada. She is the author of two previous poetry titles, Somewhere, a Fire and Erratic (Hagios Press, 2004 and 2007), and the memoir Summer of the Horse (Harbour Publishing, 2018). She divides her time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, NS.

The book description for Orrery offers that “Orrery is a collection that orbits around the theme of Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons.” What prompted you to write a book around Pioneer 10?

Before Facebook, msn.ca was my go-to place for procrastination. I’d sit at the computer and watch the frames of curated news items roll by, usually on the lookout for some empty distraction like “This Week’s Best and Worst Dressed List.” One evening in 2003, an article on Pioneer 10 came up – “Pioneer 10 Calls Home Last Time.” The source of the CBC article was NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The media release read, “After more than 30 years, it appears the venerable Pioneer 10 spacecraft has sent its last signal to Earth. Pioneer’s last, very weak signal was received on Jan. 22, 2003. NASA has no additional contact attempts planned for Pioneer 10.” The idea of shutting off communication to Pioneer 10, of this human made object drifting from earth until the earth no longer existed (scientists predict that given Pioneer 10’s trajectory, it could still be travelling long after our sun has consumed the earth), haunted me. This initial fascination grew into a kind of obsession, an impulse to keep track of P10, to keep it in my imagination. I gathered as many facts as I could find, its speed, its trajectory, its weight, the number of instruments it carried. And I started to write poems inspired by the probe, ideas around transformation, materiality, consciousness.

I’m curious about the ways in which you approach a poem, akin to the notion of Dorothy Livesay’s “documentary” poem: composing lyrics that explore and document details of lived experience. What brought you to this approach?

It’s true that my poetry is lyric, and that I almost always use the material world as my launching point. Most of my concerns revolve around the material world and our relationships with each other and with other-than-human animals and life. While I admire all forms of poetry, for me, language is a way to explore these concerns. I don’t think I came to this approach in a calculated way; it is more that this was the approach that, for me, felt the most meaningful. Writing poetry (and reading it) forces me to slow down and to think things through and in so doing, often changes the way I think and perceive the world. I love the jolt of an insight which can be reassuring, surprising, or any number of other emotional responses. I love the mysteries in life, and poetry often helps me feel a bit closer to them.

In an interview posted at Geosi Reads around your prior collection, you respond that “metaphor is the engine, the workhorse of poetry.” Does this still hold true for the poems in this current collection?

I hope so. In Jan Zwicky’s recent book, The Experience of Meaning, she writes about gestalt comprehension, the phenomena of how our senses apprehend the world, and in her previous work, such as Wisdom and Metaphor, she explores how metaphor gives rise to meaning, so that, in some ways, wisdom is metaphor. This kind of thinking rings true for me and feels important to my own work. When a metaphor works (mine or someone else’s), it resonates with what feels like a truth. While I can’t say if all of my poems in Orrery achieve this, it is what I aspire to.

What was the process of organizing the final manuscript for Orrery? Many of your poems feel akin to lyric bursts, which would require a particular order and shape to the final collection. Did this emerge organically, or was there a shape you were aiming toward?

The poems in Orrery are not so much about Pioneer 10 as inspired by philosophical ideas arising from the probe. In ordering the final manuscript, poems that directly reference P10 or space travel were put into the first section of the book as more of a logical choice; the second section accesses more of the human “I” while the third section employs more other-than-human life as the subject. But there was also an organic ordering in each section and as a whole I hoped to build an overall shape of wonder and empathy for the world around us.

I’m wondering your take on nostalgia. How does one write without romanticising the past?

I am not a fan of nostalgia, and I am not a Romantic. When I do address the subject of nostalgia or write in what one might call high lyricism, that is, expressing emotion or reverence for the material world, I find that humour, restraint, and demotic speech help to quell sentimentality.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Orrery was completed? What have you been working on since?

I am currently working on another poetry manuscript that explores the ways Western society continues to distinguish between humans and other animals in ways that suggest we are not the same organism. I’ve been doing a lot of research into the work of philosophers, biologists, naturalists, and writers engaged in animal studies. I’m also exploring the double-edged sword of anthropomorphism, how anthropomorphizing other animals can negatively affect our thoughts about and therefore our relationships with them as well as risks evaluating another animal’s intelligence based solely on our own capacities. But then, on its other edge, denouncing anthropomorphism can deny other animals similar capacities such as emotions, languages, and dreaming, resulting in their exploitation and the loss of their habitat. In my work, I’m considering the sentience, cognition and emotion that exists in all animals and I’m addressing in a more general way the underlying structures of thought that contribute to intolerance and lack of empathy as it affects not only other animals, but also differences in race, class, and gender identity within our own species.