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    Winter Cranes
    Winter Cranes
    Winter Cranes
    Ebook70 pages27 minutes

    Winter Cranes

    By Chris Banks

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In Asian folklore cranes symbolize longevity, immortality, and good fortune.
    In Winter Cranes, his third collection, award–winning poet Chris Banks
    conjures these birds when he sees herons near his home towards the end
    of a long and difficult winter.

    For the poet, cranes as a dominant image represent the gaps that exist
    between what we see and what we feel. His poems explore the
    impermanence of our modern lives — how our identities are shaped by the
    past and the present, memory and experience, the physical and the
    metaphysical. Winter Cranes shows Banks to be an uncompromising
    poet determined to understand his experience of a world constantly
    changing around him.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9781770901032
    Winter Cranes
    Author

    Chris Banks

    Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Deepfake Serenade by Nightwood Editions in 2021. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for Poetry by the Canadian Authors Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, GRIFFEL, American Poetry Journal and PRISM International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.

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      Book preview

      Winter Cranes - Chris Banks

      Simplicity"

      Darkening

      •

      The simple joy of riding with good friends

      in a car coming back from a barn dance

      on the edge of a great lake in mid-March,

      driving through falling snow on blizzarding

      country roads, past farms, silos, cattle barns

      recessed in deep shadows as Stand By Me

      spills from the radio. But on that night

      our car hit black ice and skittered across

      the road’s slick surface like a water bug

      — twenty-odd yards — before coming to rest

      in a snowbank beside a farmer’s house.

      A man appeared out of the dark, walking

      down his laneway. He asked if anyone

      was hurt. Are you okay? Seeing the car

      was undamaged, he said he could tow it

      out with his tractor. I remember that

      night walking up the road, a hundred yards

      or more, in the moonless dark, without so

      much as a flare or a flashlight to wave down

      passing cars, wondering why my friends

      and I had survived the crash. Wondering

      why I was not dead. I can still see myself

      standing impatiently, wind barreling

      across fields, over snow fences, the cold

      licking raw the flesh beneath my jacket,

      trying to hail the drivers of three cars

      not bothering to stop, not quite certain

      whether they saw a figure half-glimpsed

      in the helixing snow at that late hour,

      a messenger risen up from the ground,

      to warn them of some impending hazard

      until too late they found an old tractor

      upon the road. And what I remember

      of that night will not call back anyone

      from the past. Not the vehicles swerving

      to carve a wide groove in a winter field

      crusted with thin ice and eddying snow.

      Not the farmer on the tractor cursing,

      his breath rising, a white scar, mixing in

      plumes of diesel smoke in the chilly air.

      Not even my younger self, who I see

      standing roadside like an apparition

      turning his body to stare back down

      the dark hallway of a moment ago.

      Exodus

      •

      The wind in the white birches

      moves across the valley’s floor,

      the farms, the fields, the orchards

      where fruit pickers long gone

      work each new harvest season

      singing laments and drinking

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