Harry Thurston’s book of poetry, Ultramarine published by Gaspereau Press in 2023, was a finalist for the 2024 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.
These poems explore our relationship with the passage of time, both as individuals and as a species. Whether examining the lost world of childhood through the long lens of memory, piecing together random fragments in the broken mosaics of his “tesserae” poems, or wrestling to put the exile, isolation and vulnerability of the global pandemic into a more-than-human-world perspective, Thurston tracks “Light and occult,/the two realms we navigate,” trusting that the persistence of these “frail human signs” might still signal hope and possibility.
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“..essential reading for our times. Combining a naturalist’s gift for attention with a poet’s keen ear, this collection offers thoughtful, musical poems on childhood, family, and non-human animals. At the heart of this collection is an extended meditation on the workings of time, explored through poems spanning decades in the speaker’s life, as well as other pieces that gesture towards time’s unfathomable reaches. Varied in both form and tome, this is a probing book that pays fitting homage to the “little wonders” of our world.” Jury citation, JM Abraham Atlantic Poetry award, 2024
In Keeping Watch at the End of the World, Harry Thurston explores the ways in which poetry stands sentinel at the edge-places where known and unknown meet. Whether that frontier lies between land and sea, present and past, health and illness, or youth and aging, Thurston holds that the poet’s duty is to survey the horizon and “see things before they take shape,” chronicling occurrences both acute and remote. A poet-naturalist in the tradition of Thoreau, Thurston reminds us of the importance of being fully present in the midst of our own brief lives, of shaping what we see into poetry’s “steeped words–dark, light, and sweetened gifts.”