Return to Book Page The Cold Panes of Surfaces By Chris Banks AVAILABLE 0-88971-222-0 Nightwood Editions 5.5 x 8 · 96 pages Paperback · $16.95 November 2006 “[Banks’ work] manages to combine humour and breathlessness in a way that Canadian poetry seldom does.” —Emily Schultz, Broken Pencil “If the mood is often tinged with melancholy, the descriptions are wonderfully evocative: sailboats are ‘moored to their own reflections, like arks / filled with night's solace’; the landscape in ‘Escarpment Country’ consists of ‘townships and concessions tack-hammered together / into a huge picnic-cloth of / russet browns, tawny yellows, forests and farmlands spread out / like a rippling sea of lost details.‘ Look past that frost-forming title; this collection is chock full of deft phrasing and memorable images.” —Barbara Carey, Toronto Star “Chris Banks takes the incidental moments of our lives and raise them with stunningly precise language, to the level of the divine… the imagery is always fresh and revelatory, as if Bansk were taking us by the hand, pointing to the world around us and saying, “Here is beauty. Here it is again. And here.” —Leah Rae, Geist "Banks honours poets who have undoubtedly influenced him - they include Wallace Stevens, Wordsworth and Keats, Yeats and Front - but his voice owes the most to Earle Briney and Al Purdy, two Canadian poets who shared Bank's compassionate attentiveness to nature. "Nature is everywhere in Banks' poems, whether they are set in the country or in the city... "Cold Panes of Surfaces confirms the emergence of a poet who has meaningful things to say and who possesses the language tools to say it well." —Robert Reid, The Record "Cold Panes of Surfaces offers appreciative readers 96-pages of Chris Banks' superbly crafted and enthusiastically recommended prose poems." —Library Bookwatch "Banks is a keeper. I look forward to his progress." —Andrew Vaisius, prairiefire