The Multitudinous Sparseness of Space in Harry Thurston’s Broken Vessel

Abstract

In January and February 2000, Canadian poet-naturalist Harry Thurston (b. 1950) spent 35 days in the Sahara with a team of archaeologists conducting research at the Egyptian oasis of Dakhleh in the Western Desert. Confronted with the vastness of a territory at once foreign and familiar, he decided to respond to the experience of living in the desert with poems of haiku-like brevity he would write each day he spent on camp. The fruit of this spiritual experience was Broken Vessel (2007), a book that seeks to capture the mystery of the desert, a space that has held a century-long fascination for the human imagination. Following Tuan’s dichotomy of space vs. place, Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, and ecocritical concepts concerning ecopoetry as place-making, this article examines Thurston’s insights into the more-than-human world embodied by the desert, based on his firsthand observations and his imaginings of the known and revealed history of the Sahara.