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“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, Prairie Fire
"Throughout, Banks’s craft is wonderfully assured. His
leisurely, expansive lines are tightly packed with thought and feeling; his rhythms are finely attuned to the movement of a meditating mind; and his quiet, unostentatious language can give a sense of precision and mystery at one and the same time."
-Malcolm Woodland, University of Toronto Quarterly