Cold Panes Of Surfaces

Chris Banks

Nightwood Editions

c/o Harbour Publishing

PO Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, Canada, V0N 2H0

0889712220, $16.95, www.harbourpublishing.com 1-604-883-2730

"Cold Panes Of Surfaces" offers appreciative readers 96-pages of Chris Banks superbly crafted and enthusiastically recommended prose poems that take for the subject matter an impressive range of themes drawn from the Southern Ontario landscape, a fifteenth-century Japanese poet, a magician's assistant, the Muse, and all the vagaries of human relationships. 'Neighbourhood Watch': One day you come home/to a letter in your mailbox./It asks you to quietly observe/a neighbour--a young man/who owns a brick house/across the street from you./You scan the envelope for clues/to its origins, wondering how/it came to you to bear witness/to a stranger's life. but/after scrutinizing the instructions,/you sit the whole long night/outside the poor man's house,/staring through his windows,/under the lag of moon and stars,/recording his every private act or whim,/slight ashamed to be alone/rooting through his garbage, too,/looking for the secret writ to his life,/for what it is he is hiding--until,/empty-handed and solemn/you walk home, noticing someone/has trampled your rose bushes/and your garbage is strewn/like a banner of lies and half-truths, /across the city's shining ruin.