The Hundred Lives
In The Hundred Lives Russell Thornton illuminates the intricate imaginative orders of love at work within an individual life.
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.
In these pieces, the symbolic enactment of the levels and formulae of love leads to visions of eternal realities – in which human beings participate in the ongoing creation according to the forms of the interchangeability of matter and spirit that they carry, and human consciousness is at once participant, celebrant, and witness.
Reviewed in “Event” by Leslie Timmins
About The Author
Reviews of this Book
The Vancouver Sun reviews “The Hundred Lives” by Russell Thornton
A wonderful interview by Catherine Graham with Russell Thornton and The Rusty Toque
“Thornton’s poems inhabit a world hauntingly human and wholly material, a beautifully articulated realm of the … dance between spirit and matter.” – John Pass
Russel Thornton “Reflects on Icons, Art, and Imagination” with the Coastal Spectator
