In "Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged", his second full-length book of poems, Russell Thorburn takes on the subject of growing old. "Like a fat Mingus who fires all the musicians in his band one night," Thorburn stands alone in his middle age, "offering himself up nude." It is out of such solitude and with the hindsight of time that we are allowed to see inside the interior landscape of a poet who is not afraid to take us to "that place in his mind where every note doted on something darker, ripened into a heaven he could collect for his bruised spirit and cradle in his earthbound arms."What is cradled in Thorburn's arms in these poems is a world and its people - a series of cinematic snapshots - that Thorburn keeps alive through the act of remembering: a father drinking beer in a boat, "ageless and without purpose, ...my face beginning to inch towards a secret terror that I would never be his son again," a mother who "seized me with her beauty, and the revolution of the earth smoothed us to stillness." Thorburn holds on too to his own youth, when he was thirteen and "Father's girl, wading through the weeds, waved at me and her bikini top popped...I felt her skin thrill me in a way lily pads never had.
..""Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged" is Thorburn's personal odyssey of crossing the half-century mark, a journey chronicled and held open to us readers as if we are watching a not-so-foreign film. As Jim Daniels writes in his back-cover praise for this book, "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."