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The Cold Panes of Surfaces
The Cold Panes of Surfaces is the moving second collection of poems from award-winning author Chris Banks.
Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings to it a distinctly modern edge, meditating on "the rent we are paying to the planet for our waning lives." Here, beetles become "child kamikazes... a wallpaper of yellow-winged flames" and the planet is a "Museum of Natural Beauty."
Banks takes imaginative leaps into the worlds of a magician's assistant, a fifteenth-century Japanese poet, and the Muse. Most of all, these poems eloquently describe childhood, loss in all its forms, the vagaries of relationships, and being "a sullen young man / caught in the world's fist."
The Cold Panes of Surfaces is a remarkable collection, and a fitting follow-up to Banks' award-winning first book Bonfires .
Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings to it a distinctly modern edge, meditating on "the rent we are paying to the planet for our waning lives." Here, beetles become "child kamikazes... a wallpaper of yellow-winged flames" and the planet is a "Museum of Natural Beauty."
Banks takes imaginative leaps into the worlds of a magician's assistant, a fifteenth-century Japanese poet, and the Muse. Most of all, these poems eloquently describe childhood, loss in all its forms, the vagaries of relationships, and being "a sullen young man / caught in the world's fist."
The Cold Panes of Surfaces is a remarkable collection, and a fitting follow-up to Banks' award-winning first book Bonfires .
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2022
Here we are
all the same.
Here we are
nothing alike.
We build houses
with fences.
Nature lies dead
under gardens
and paving stones.
There are no more
burning bushes,
or old masters
to remind us
all is emptiness
except for this
drawing of breath
from whatever
depth our days
are wrung.
* * *
That gose-flesh shimmy
down the spine - an
intergalactic aria of joy
sung in Z major,
beamed from a distant planet
and patched into
the body's PA system,
whenever the boss scalds
himself with hot coffee
or the annoying child
from the fairy tale picks
door number three
and is eaten by wolves -
that insufferable brat!
Schadenfreude. A
word retched up from
the bowels to make
a battered self feel better
every time a stranger
slips on a patch of ice,
or when a couple's
love and devotion
suddenly combusts
into divorce, and
although you chastise
yourself for giving in
to its sweet and sour,
there it is anyways,
that worm of a word,
coiling in on itself,
slowly feeding on you
from the inside out.
Schadenfreude.
* * *
who living in sea's
darkness, make
a luminescence
of their skin
to attract prey, or
potential mates,
are what I think of
as you lay beside me
glowing a little, too,
from the wine.
* * *
It comes down like rain,
singing paeans to hiddenness,
extending olive branches,
gifts of praise, after you
give up pursuit of its voice,
and let yourself be free,
keeping quiet all your life
what stories you know to be
sleeping under the stars.
It comes upon you, of its
own accord, this gleaning,
this seeing through to those
things that love darkness,
moving beyond where
the light of day is cruel
and a pain, to where
you can forget yourself,
succumb to silence,
its constancy, what is
inaudible and unsayable -
bu so loud, it speaks.
* * *
Deep remembering takes hold of your hand
and leads you further and further into the naves
of your memory, the cathedral you make of
a past hardly worth recalling. And yet, there is
a summer where you build a golf course
and fall in love with a girl, and work in a factory,
or fight with your mother over a motorcycle
you wish to buy, so you may visit another girl
in a different town, in a wholly different year.
But then just as quickly the present lobbies
for your attention, dropping sheets of rain
in wet hand slaps against your windowsill,
ragged watermarks of want, that remind you
the past is gone and twenty years have grown
like a slow-moving glacier over its passing.
* * *
Sometimes you glimpse it
out of your eye's tail-flick
on the immense horizon
*
after crossing the days
to where Memory and Desire
spent all those winters;
*
and although every road
or path turns you from
its borders, you see its
*
high marble walls rising
in the distance, men
and women working outside
*
under the sun's oculus,
words spilling from their mouths
like rare offerings of love.
*
And even as they toil
night and day, in dirt fields
between green mounds,
*
the tombs their forebears
are buried under, they labour on
because they have learned
*
the price of their freedom
is also the price of hard work,
making their spirits happy,
*
their lives full of a contentment
that is nearly see-through,
which is why to look at them
*
from such a wavering distance
is to sometimes believe
they are not even there.
all the same.
Here we are
nothing alike.
We build houses
with fences.
Nature lies dead
under gardens
and paving stones.
There are no more
burning bushes,
or old masters
to remind us
all is emptiness
except for this
drawing of breath
from whatever
depth our days
are wrung.
- Suburban, pg. 16
* * *
That gose-flesh shimmy
down the spine - an
intergalactic aria of joy
sung in Z major,
beamed from a distant planet
and patched into
the body's PA system,
whenever the boss scalds
himself with hot coffee
or the annoying child
from the fairy tale picks
door number three
and is eaten by wolves -
that insufferable brat!
Schadenfreude. A
word retched up from
the bowels to make
a battered self feel better
every time a stranger
slips on a patch of ice,
or when a couple's
love and devotion
suddenly combusts
into divorce, and
although you chastise
yourself for giving in
to its sweet and sour,
there it is anyways,
that worm of a word,
coiling in on itself,
slowly feeding on you
from the inside out.
Schadenfreude.
- Shadenfreude, pg. 22-23
* * *
who living in sea's
darkness, make
a luminescence
of their skin
to attract prey, or
potential mates,
are what I think of
as you lay beside me
glowing a little, too,
from the wine.
- Lantern Fish, pg. 36
* * *
It comes down like rain,
singing paeans to hiddenness,
extending olive branches,
gifts of praise, after you
give up pursuit of its voice,
and let yourself be free,
keeping quiet all your life
what stories you know to be
sleeping under the stars.
It comes upon you, of its
own accord, this gleaning,
this seeing through to those
things that love darkness,
moving beyond where
the light of day is cruel
and a pain, to where
you can forget yourself,
succumb to silence,
its constancy, what is
inaudible and unsayable -
bu so loud, it speaks.
- The Gleaning, pg. 45
* * *
Deep remembering takes hold of your hand
and leads you further and further into the naves
of your memory, the cathedral you make of
a past hardly worth recalling. And yet, there is
a summer where you build a golf course
and fall in love with a girl, and work in a factory,
or fight with your mother over a motorcycle
you wish to buy, so you may visit another girl
in a different town, in a wholly different year.
But then just as quickly the present lobbies
for your attention, dropping sheets of rain
in wet hand slaps against your windowsill,
ragged watermarks of want, that remind you
the past is gone and twenty years have grown
like a slow-moving glacier over its passing.
- Cathedral, pg. 55
* * *
Sometimes you glimpse it
out of your eye's tail-flick
on the immense horizon
*
after crossing the days
to where Memory and Desire
spent all those winters;
*
and although every road
or path turns you from
its borders, you see its
*
high marble walls rising
in the distance, men
and women working outside
*
under the sun's oculus,
words spilling from their mouths
like rare offerings of love.
*
And even as they toil
night and day, in dirt fields
between green mounds,
*
the tombs their forebears
are buried under, they labour on
because they have learned
*
the price of their freedom
is also the price of hard work,
making their spirits happy,
*
their lives full of a contentment
that is nearly see-through,
which is why to look at them
*
from such a wavering distance
is to sometimes believe
they are not even there.
- Citadel, pg. 64-65
April 28, 2011
I get most of my book suggestions from industry newsletters or by reading reviews on other book blogs. This one came via my son. He came home from school excited one day and told me that I just had to go and buy this book of poetry called Bonfires. He had been studying poetry in English class and it turned out that his teacher had published some of them in a collection. Off we went to the local independent store. Couldn't find the suggested edition, and bought his second book instead. Here I am with Chris Banks' book in hand and my son every day asking whether I have started reading. Well, it is National Poetry Month, I decided I would jump right in.
I haven't read a poetry book in decades and thus had to sit and reflect on how to go about reading these little nuggets of , well, what are they. Here's what I came up with.
Reading poems is like eating pierogis. They appear soft and smooth on the surface, but you can't see what's inside. It's going to be a surprise. You can guess what's in there, but you can't be sure. Next you can choose to slather on all sorts of expectations such as sour cream and fried onions. That's like having expectations that the poem with be all sappy with lovey dovey stuff or that it will be hard to understand. You can eat just one and savour it, or you can munch down on a bowlful and go back for more.
In the end, your hunger gets to you, and you just have to dig in.
That's what I did, one or two poems at a time for the most part, though a few days I was gluttonous and ate a whole bowlful. I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the poems, I was able to find their flavour right away, others I had to take a second or third bite. There was one poem I just had to keep going back to. "Wrecking Ball" is about teenage suicide. Mr. Banks is a high school teacher; I never before considered how such an incident could impact on the teachers.
In the poem "The Sky is Falling" the reader is asked to consider experiencing something you had never even heard of for the very first time. Something way outside your realm of ever considering possible.
I was intrigued by several poems that reached out to historic figures. General Maresuke Nogi and the poet Ikkyu and both new names to me, but I found I couldn't leave them in the poem, I had to search them out and learn more.
I haven't read a poetry book in decades and thus had to sit and reflect on how to go about reading these little nuggets of , well, what are they. Here's what I came up with.
Reading poems is like eating pierogis. They appear soft and smooth on the surface, but you can't see what's inside. It's going to be a surprise. You can guess what's in there, but you can't be sure. Next you can choose to slather on all sorts of expectations such as sour cream and fried onions. That's like having expectations that the poem with be all sappy with lovey dovey stuff or that it will be hard to understand. You can eat just one and savour it, or you can munch down on a bowlful and go back for more.
In the end, your hunger gets to you, and you just have to dig in.
That's what I did, one or two poems at a time for the most part, though a few days I was gluttonous and ate a whole bowlful. I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the poems, I was able to find their flavour right away, others I had to take a second or third bite. There was one poem I just had to keep going back to. "Wrecking Ball" is about teenage suicide. Mr. Banks is a high school teacher; I never before considered how such an incident could impact on the teachers.
In the poem "The Sky is Falling" the reader is asked to consider experiencing something you had never even heard of for the very first time. Something way outside your realm of ever considering possible.
I was intrigued by several poems that reached out to historic figures. General Maresuke Nogi and the poet Ikkyu and both new names to me, but I found I couldn't leave them in the poem, I had to search them out and learn more.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews