The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt. The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive ... -- from "Nest of the Swan's Bones" Russell Thornton's latest collection of poems, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain, explores powerful, primary human relationships through images of two worlds: the natural and the urban industrial. Simple grass is the iron of an invisible forging within nature that involves the human creative consciousness. A scavenger alley crow is the universal creative spirit in brutal primordial disguise. A murderously violent father and son are integrated into a single new man who walks "bright as a song in the air". A young daughter flings up her arms to seagulls that "collect up the world, opening it like a door". An infant son fights the "anger in him the death with the heaven in living flailing hands". Intensely personal this book reveals how essential human identity re-initiates human consciousness in a participatory universe.