The White Light of Tomorrow

A masterful new collection from award-winning poet Russell Thornton.

With intense lyricism, Thornton records his imaginative movement between the element of water, waking to “the aloneness of water,” and the phenomenon of light, comprehending “light” as “fate” and “love” as “memory of light.” In the process, Thornton highlights how hard lives can manifest beauty and affirmation. A mother transcends degrading circumstances through laughter. A long-lost father’s drafting set case is a “coffin,” its tools a “skeleton;” his “ashes are buried” in the poet’s “arm.”

Revelations of nature abound. Thornton’s rainy locale lifts onto the mythical level, water “wrapping around” him, “holding” him “complete / as within womb water about to break.” Herons’ wings “span the countless characters” of a creek.” A description of an ancient BC site is a rapt engagement with Indigenous petroglyphs. An exploration of a Song of Songs passage details “light … one with turns of the yarn” of a shawl, “a touch within a touch.” Classical myth informs a poem about a power outage; the speaker enters “the elsewhere of the night” to build a fire.

Passionate and moving, this collection marks a fine advance in Thornton’s expanding poetic output.