Poetry Is Dead

The Cold Panes of Surface

January 18, 2010 by Leah Rae 

The Cold Panes of Surfaces By Chris Banks

At the top of the Tarot deck is a card called The Magician. Given the number 1 to signify his importance, The Magician stands in the centre of the card with one hand holding a wand aimed at the sky and the other hand pointed toward the ground, symbolizing his ability to manifest here on Earth all that is above. In his book The Cold Panes of Surfaces (Nightwood Editions, 2006), poet Chris Banks reverses this clandestine process, taking the incidental moments of our lives and raising them with stunningly precise language to the level of the divine. Lines like “Today, field crickets with hum-bucking bones/recite whole tribal histories and mythologies/To the tune of an undiagnosed sadness” prove Banks’s immense skill as he crafts his poetry with the exactness of a fine tailor. Although the poems in The Cold Panes of Surfaces tackle much traditional poetic territory—coming of age, travel in foreign lands, falling in love—the imagery is always fresh and revelatory, as if Banks is taking you by the hand, pointing to the world around you and saying, "Here is beauty. Here it is again. And here."

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tags The Cold Panes of Surfaces Nightwood Editions Chris Banks

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About the Author

Leah Rae’s work has been published in EVENT, The Antigonish Review, Room of One’s Own, The Claremont Review, Antithesis, and W49th. She regularly contributes to Geist magazine. Her work has been anthologized in From This New World and the Best of the Claremont Review and has been shortlisted for the ARC Poem of the Year contest. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from UBC. She is the managing editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine.