Rummaging a bit through rob mclennan's blog, I came across a review where he was touting Chris Banks's Midlife Action Figure. This looked interesting, so I put this and The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory on hold at the library, but they haven't come through yet. I also stumbled across a very reasonably priced copy of Winter Cranes (not available at the library), so I ordered that, but that isn't here yet either. I was, however, able to borrow Banks's second collection, The Cold Panes of Surfaces. Overall, I liked but didn't love this book. I'm hoping that I see him develop into a stronger poet or simply perhaps one more attuned to my urbanized interests.
Many but not all of the poems in this book are on pastoral themes. It's quite difficult for me to fairly or meaningfully evaluate such poems, as it is so far outside my area of interest. Somewhat amusingly, Banks essentially calls on the spirit of Wordsworth in "My Own Private Tintern Abbey," perhaps in an admission that so many of our direct experiences are mediated by or reflected through others' experiences, so it is no small stretch that a nature poet would essentially fess up that his view of the countryside is refracted through his impressions on how Wordsworth would have seen it if he had gotten to Canada first. While I find this poem a bit too self-reflexive for my transportation anthology, I do like these lines: "A man can walk a river his entire life, / watching the many days sail around the bend, owning / none of it, yet find it has taken deep purchase within him."
In truth, I'm more likely to just wait to see what his more recent collections have on offer, but the poem that closes out the collection, "Early Spring," another poem about going for a walk in the countryside, is at least in the running. "The sky above / mills out a few restless clouds, grinding / them into a fine grist. A freezing rain. /All morning glassed in. Now walking / here, you are forced to step carefully / over sedge, brake, mud, roots..."
One of the first poems in the collection is about a magician's assistant who wished at least some of the applause was for her. Many, many years ago I wrote a handful of poems about carnival life, and one was about a knife thrower and his assistant, so it's interesting to see someone tackle the same general theme from a different angle. Banks closes the poem out on a fairly somber note with the assistant feeling used up or emptied out, "after each show, and me feeling / more like half a person, vanishing, / ever so slowly, without a trace."
There is a poem titled "Schadenfreude." I'm not certain it was inspired by the song of the same title in Avenue Q, but it's not impossible either. While Avenue Q didn't open in Toronto until 2008 (and I saw it in Vancouver in 2014), it opened in New York in 2004. Anyway, it certainly is very much in the same spirit naturally: "every time a stranger / slips on a patch of ice, / or when a couple's / love and devotion / suddenly combusts / into divorce ... / 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, / ... / Schadenfreude."
My favourite poem is "Dark Matter," most likely in part because it is set in Toronto. Also, the poem has faint echoes (in my mind at least) with the Tragically Hip song "Bobcaygeon," though in the song the constellations are emerging whereas in "Dark Matter" the stars are winking out. The poem unfolds as if it was a slow-motion disaster flick: "we drove to High Park, passing gridlocked intersections / full of smashed cars, / listening to the sirens go off in the midtown streets, / ... / Dark Matter filling up the car and the city / and the silence between us, / ... / as we wished for whatever was coming / to descend mercifully swift." Some of the more esoteric branches of cosmology indeed posit an unstable universe that might be unravelled by all the unseen and indeed unobservable dark matter. Heady thoughts indeed.
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