FATHER, TELL ME I HAVE NOT AGED
				Russell Thorburn Paperback - April 2007 84 Pages ISBN: 0-9779703-6-1 USD $14.95 + Shipping A memoir in poetry drawing upon childhood, love and loss, with a french turn to film, especially Truffaut, in explaining the human spirit.

About the Author, Russell Thorburn

Reviews

Russell Thorburn’s Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged is as sure-footed and persuasive a poetry collection as I have come across in a long time. To say it both devastates and delights with its insights is simply to acknowledge the book’s depth and accuracy of emotion, its abiding humanity, and its vigorous pursuit of linguistic exuberance. I was not only moved by what I encountered in these poems, I was compelled. This is poetry of the first order. – Jack Driscoll

If every poem is, as Frost says, an adventure, then Russell Thorburn is a reliable guide and these poems, cinematic in their unfolding, full of startling visions and remembrance — good, rare gifts, indeed. – Thomas Lynch

In this collection of brilliant meditative poems, Russell Thorburn examines the strange ironies of being human, shaking his head in wonder, regret, bemusement, and even ecstasy. He looks back on the simplicity of the past with the wisdom of someone who knows no such simple life exists. Despite the shadow of death looming over these poems, despite the battle against the erasure of our pasts, Thorburn finds plenty to celebrate, for ultimately, this is a book of acceptance of life, with all its flaws — an acceptance of the human, stripped down to all its beauty and terror. – Jim Daniels

I’m wanting to leave these poems by Russell Thorburn on church pews and park benches, to fill cargo planes with his poems and airdrop them all over the world. I’m wanting to rush up to strangers on the street, the grocery store clerk, and to offer this collection as currency, to beg the ranting world one listener at a time to sit here and be still and be ruined alive by these fine poems. . . . You hold in your hands an artifact born of spark and tinder and this poet’s stubborn diligence. – John Rybicki

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a guest said:

The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard Published by Litterature d’Aphelie, an imprint of Rocky Shore Books I first fell in love with Russell Thorburn’s poems because of their wild sense of invention, poems that liked to play with history and time, that liked to take such public figures as Ty Cobb and Apollinaire and place them into strangely contemporary situations. There was something of the ‘never before’ in these earlier poems that Thorburn seemed to be pulling out from thin air, a sleight of hand poetics that seemed to be hiding up his magician’s sleeve. Of late, in his last two books, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged and here in his latest, The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard, Thorburn has turned away from persona and invention in favor of the deeply personal, the skinlessly domestic—the tensions of the marital bedroom, the desires that still burn for other lovers, other lives—and although it’s difficult to say if Thorburn is inventing a personal past or drawing from it, the end result is that the feelings behind these new poems are authentically and emotionally true and that the hard truths that the poet is making point to a life that is turbulent and trembling with familial unrest. To read these poems is to encounter the heart of a man that is shaped by the ache of longing and driven by the insistence to go on living and loving even though it might be easier to surrender to the silence and indifference of inarticulation. These are poems of the first order, made out of the Beckettian mustness—I can’t go on, I must go on—that resides on the flipside of can’t. And I’m happy that he has, that Russell Thorburn did. --Peter Markus

August 17, 2009

a guest said:

Russell Thorburn is having two new books out Fall 2009! He is more prolific than ever. Check out his book with Marick Press "Father Tell Me I Have Not Aged" Thorburn writes across as broad an imaginative spectrum as any poet working today. The subjects of The Drunken Piano are exquisitely varied—real and fantastic literary biography, childhood rapture, rock and roll, adolescence, old movies, spies, soldiers, love, baseball played by sons and legends, the Russian cold of Upper Michigan. And through all this, the mental life we inhabit has a consistent complexity, depth and (above all) authenticity that makes this book the best of company. --Jonathan Johnson, associate professor at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University; poet, Mastodon 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves Notes pulled from a Bergmanesque cello, house whiskey, the grainy surface of film noir detective movies—sepia nights and sleepless mornings, you will want Russell Thorburn’s Drunken Piano at your bedside…travel with them in your back pocket, but you won’t rest easy: these poems are too miraculous for that. --Bronwyn Mills, Professor of Caribbean Literature at Northern Michigan University, author of forthcoming novel, Beastly In The Drunken Piano Russell Thorburn creates an intense and complicatedly emotional persona by using the fictional consciousness of others. It’s edgy stuff, out there where death, sex, war, and nature intermingle into blisters of erotic awareness. Thorburn creates a set of dynamics that transcends the merely notational narrative of the historical, assimilating his truths into a powerful poetic style. Heavily enjambed, his diction and syntax are brutally harsh in the service of beauty and truth. These are some of the most urgent lyric intertwinings I’ve read in a while—narrative poems of such velocity they blur into music, and, I am tempted to say, pure song. And yet it is a terrible music as well, completely authentic. Read this book for the way it shatters the boundaries of “story” by creating an original and necessary human noise that is the thing we remember when we put the book down. Which is why we return. Russell Thorburn has turned into the kind of poet I want to read and reread over and over again. One of the few. --David Dodd Lee, author of four books of poems, Downsides of Fish Culture, Wilderness, Arrow Pointing North, and The Nervous Filaments

August 17, 2009