The Cold Panes of Surfaces

Kim Fahner teaches English and history at Marymount Academy in Sudbury,
Ontario.

Chris Banks slips, with great ease, between past and present, between
what is lost and what is found in this collection. His poems are
elegantly layered pieces of image and metaphor that sweep the reader
into the centre of each poem.

In looking to the remembered and nostalgic past, the poet also looks to
our future. In “Divination,” he cautions us to “be patient” when
waiting for signs. The signs, when they do appear, seem to weave
themselves into landscape with the power of poetry. “Moonlight’s
white / book falls open across the lawn. / Words shine wetly in the
grasses. / This is the poem written there.” Make no mistake; here is a
poet who lives and writes in (and through) landscape—a landscape that
can at times be external and natural, but that is also rooted in the
passage of time, personal memory, and remembrance.

Northern images abound. In “Now, Then, Always,” Banks evokes the
timeless image of a young boy “swimming a cold, dark lake in northern
Ontario.” The boy reappears in the poem “Northern Ontario”: “I
remember little except for that boy’s shape out on those lakes, /
which is the real trick of forgetting: when caught in between / what
was, and what is, you go unrecognized even to yourself.”

What pulls at the heart is the bittersweet tang of how memories can
shift. Banks plays with the notion of time and memory, so that one ends
up thinking of one’s own past. In “Cathedral,” he reminds us that
“the past is gone and twenty years have grown / like a slow-moving
glacier over its passing.”