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Bonfires
Bringing Canadian poetry back to the achingly honest tradition of John Newlove and Bronwen Wallace, Chris Banks eschews linguistic showmanship, sketching in deft strokes the foreignness of things familiar.
Framed within the rural landscape of southwestern Ontario and Al Purdy's "country north of Belleville," Banks turns his pen to modern life and the small domestic urgencies that arise from it. This is a landscape we are all familiar with - grocery lines, "chemical-green lawns," piles of gas bills and tax receipts, endless whirring highways and "a nacreous moon shining/ over condominiums." A pointed and unrequited longing underpins Bonfires , but rather than toil in the darkness of his daily observations, Banks presses on to show us the essential centre where "everything disassembles itself / into some new clarity here."
Framed within the rural landscape of southwestern Ontario and Al Purdy's "country north of Belleville," Banks turns his pen to modern life and the small domestic urgencies that arise from it. This is a landscape we are all familiar with - grocery lines, "chemical-green lawns," piles of gas bills and tax receipts, endless whirring highways and "a nacreous moon shining/ over condominiums." A pointed and unrequited longing underpins Bonfires , but rather than toil in the darkness of his daily observations, Banks presses on to show us the essential centre where "everything disassembles itself / into some new clarity here."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 23, 2022
Moonlight clasps the floorboards,
the walls resonant
with the sounds of our shared lungs
moving a cavern of air.
The argument forgotten
at the dinner table
like leftovers
for tomorrow's breakfast.
In four months time,
there will be one final argument,
but for now
there is simply our breathing,
the slough of moonlight,
and the slow erasure of self
insulating us from whatever it is
we cannot overcome.
* * *
The sky is dawning; a new lavender
where birds, caught in lariats of wind,
range from the clouds' upper battlements
to stipple early morning fields
with their mortal presence. Who I am
or who you claim to be scarcely matters;
only the smell of ozone settling
over our clothes, the blood scribing praise
through our hearts. And these birds
who need to find a wintering place:
dark wings beating against the wet and damp
lifting into the absence of the earth.
* * *
This night walk the pebbled road to the bay.
Watch as you pass men and women leaving the local the local bar.
Their bodies mugged by wind. Totems carved human.
Remember how earlier you lay awake for hours
under arctic skies banked with granite light
listening to the injured cried of the pack,
the hunting and the killing in the luminous streets;
how the bright voices of your children
came to your window long past midnight
to celebrate the simple magic of play.
The sky you walk under is no one's sovereignty.
The land a palace of stones. Night is
the colour of dawn, the colour of the ocean
dreaming at the feet of white hills. Ice floes
drift across the bay like cap-sized ships.
Tomorrow, only this light will exist.
* * *
Yesterday, he revealed herself to me
on the edge of the Trans-Canada,
amid the cornfields and wood-gutted barns:
a statue of the Virgin, arms wide open,
blessing the tonnage of passing cars
en route from Cornwall to Quebec City.
Our Lady of the Cornfields, I whispered,
scanning her plastered face.
Someone's crushing faith worn
like an invisible garment around her.
And for a moment I felt
something akin to faith rise
warmly in my chest, corralled deeply
within - and then nothing -
but highway and her behind me
standing in a basilica of corn, my car just
another in a long line of witnesses
edging towards other stations.
* * *
Sometimes, out of the darkness,
a voice rises, bodiless, full of reprises
and jettisoned loves, garotting
what is left of its source. Knowing
it is my mother, moist-eyed and
pain-deep, crying into her phone,
it strikes me what separates
our lives at this moment is more
than 2X4's, plaster and drywall -
it is the dark spillways of the past
and its unmentionables - that voice
sequestered inside a sadness
I recognize and at times feel also,
when later I hear her drop the phone
to cry against my bedroom walls.
* * *
You sit night after night, at a table or a desk,
windows thick with stars, trying to give form
to something you feel is missing in your life,
but isn't missing, just misplaced, like a movie
where the guy everyone thought was dead
really isn't, and comes back in the big finale.
This is the Hollywood ending, not your own,
not even midstream through your thirties
where hope plays the part of the millionaire recluse,
and despair that of the angry kid who takes joy
in keying the shiny red hood of your heart,
leaving only your doubts to follow you home
to shoot a documentary called The Off Hours,
about your life or lack of it. And when you see it
playing in your neighbourhood, you take it in,
making comments like: Oh, I don't talk like that,
until realizing that sad pretender, that poor rube
talking up on the screen, he's all you have left.
* * *
The boy died: he left at dusk
with the last butterfly of summer.
A young man now sleeps in the gilded cage
of his bones. In his dream,
the boy returns - an old man
carrying his poverty and his shoes.
And moving very slowly, like one
who has lived a long time,
he pulls his shadow across the fields,
the moon's last remains.
the walls resonant
with the sounds of our shared lungs
moving a cavern of air.
The argument forgotten
at the dinner table
like leftovers
for tomorrow's breakfast.
In four months time,
there will be one final argument,
but for now
there is simply our breathing,
the slough of moonlight,
and the slow erasure of self
insulating us from whatever it is
we cannot overcome.
- Arguments, for Cass, pg. 14
* * *
The sky is dawning; a new lavender
where birds, caught in lariats of wind,
range from the clouds' upper battlements
to stipple early morning fields
with their mortal presence. Who I am
or who you claim to be scarcely matters;
only the smell of ozone settling
over our clothes, the blood scribing praise
through our hearts. And these birds
who need to find a wintering place:
dark wings beating against the wet and damp
lifting into the absence of the earth.
- Wintering Place, pg. 25
* * *
This night walk the pebbled road to the bay.
Watch as you pass men and women leaving the local the local bar.
Their bodies mugged by wind. Totems carved human.
Remember how earlier you lay awake for hours
under arctic skies banked with granite light
listening to the injured cried of the pack,
the hunting and the killing in the luminous streets;
how the bright voices of your children
came to your window long past midnight
to celebrate the simple magic of play.
The sky you walk under is no one's sovereignty.
The land a palace of stones. Night is
the colour of dawn, the colour of the ocean
dreaming at the feet of white hills. Ice floes
drift across the bay like cap-sized ships.
Tomorrow, only this light will exist.
- Far North, pg. 32
* * *
They mark the sadness and grief of being loved
loved so intensely it is like a flame
- Al Purdy
Yesterday, he revealed herself to me
on the edge of the Trans-Canada,
amid the cornfields and wood-gutted barns:
a statue of the Virgin, arms wide open,
blessing the tonnage of passing cars
en route from Cornwall to Quebec City.
Our Lady of the Cornfields, I whispered,
scanning her plastered face.
Someone's crushing faith worn
like an invisible garment around her.
And for a moment I felt
something akin to faith rise
warmly in my chest, corralled deeply
within - and then nothing -
but highway and her behind me
standing in a basilica of corn, my car just
another in a long line of witnesses
edging towards other stations.
- Our Lady of the Cornfields, pg. 40
* * *
Sometimes, out of the darkness,
a voice rises, bodiless, full of reprises
and jettisoned loves, garotting
what is left of its source. Knowing
it is my mother, moist-eyed and
pain-deep, crying into her phone,
it strikes me what separates
our lives at this moment is more
than 2X4's, plaster and drywall -
it is the dark spillways of the past
and its unmentionables - that voice
sequestered inside a sadness
I recognize and at times feel also,
when later I hear her drop the phone
to cry against my bedroom walls.
- Through the Walls, pg. 54
* * *
You sit night after night, at a table or a desk,
windows thick with stars, trying to give form
to something you feel is missing in your life,
but isn't missing, just misplaced, like a movie
where the guy everyone thought was dead
really isn't, and comes back in the big finale.
This is the Hollywood ending, not your own,
not even midstream through your thirties
where hope plays the part of the millionaire recluse,
and despair that of the angry kid who takes joy
in keying the shiny red hood of your heart,
leaving only your doubts to follow you home
to shoot a documentary called The Off Hours,
about your life or lack of it. And when you see it
playing in your neighbourhood, you take it in,
making comments like: Oh, I don't talk like that,
until realizing that sad pretender, that poor rube
talking up on the screen, he's all you have left.
- Cinéma Vérité, pg. 63
* * *
The boy died: he left at dusk
with the last butterfly of summer.
A young man now sleeps in the gilded cage
of his bones. In his dream,
the boy returns - an old man
carrying his poverty and his shoes.
And moving very slowly, like one
who has lived a long time,
he pulls his shadow across the fields,
the moon's last remains.
- Age is a Recurring Dream, pg. 80
August 6, 2019
One of Chris Banks first poetry books. I've
read every one of his poetry books and he never disappoints. Interesting to read poems featuring longer lines than his most recent. His descriptions and narratives of everyday life, community and all things domestic are spot on and easy to relate to. He writes with humour and sensitivity no matter the subject. Too many poems to name that stood out in this reader's opinion.
read every one of his poetry books and he never disappoints. Interesting to read poems featuring longer lines than his most recent. His descriptions and narratives of everyday life, community and all things domestic are spot on and easy to relate to. He writes with humour and sensitivity no matter the subject. Too many poems to name that stood out in this reader's opinion.
September 10, 2017
I only liked about half of the poems but those I did like deserve 4 stars. What the dead won't let go, We have ruins and Age is a recurring dream were all winners for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews