Reviews

When reading poetry it can be hard to figure out why a writer sticks to the narrative of their own life. Autobiography can sometimes seem too easy a gesture, not interesting enough to be shared. Not the case here. With unspeakable courage, Clare Banks takes us back to the start of what she remembers and leads us through scenes of the truest kind of pathos. Her ability to retrace her steps intelligently and heartfully is stunning, her pictures of the natural world, and her family’s place in it, clear-eyed, gracious, artful and intense. This book opens with the feel of a great mystery and never lets up. See for yourself! – Don Berger, The Rose of Maine

The world has waited too long for Clare Banks’s miraculous debut, Notes on Endings. Throughout this extended elegy for her sister, Banks’s singular imagination and sinuous syntax transform grief into song, creating an ecology of melancholy. Banks is a lyrical pastoral poet, hyper-attuned to and in love with the landscape, turning to cardinal flower, paulownia, cinquefoil, camelia, a bed of iris, a fern garden, and cottonmouths, to construct a new language for loss. The speaker disappears into the hushed music of memory, an observer and archivist of place and its metaphors, choosing the true over the sentimental: “Today, the dead/ are dead and I’m sitting in the sun.// Look at me refusing them.” – Lindsay Bernal, What it Doesn’t Have to do With

The poems in Notes on Endings teleport readers to a past that’s as vivid as the “cygnet down” of a sister’s hair, yet we never escape the shadow of present-day grief pressing onto each page. I experienced full-body tremors more than once while reading this debut collection by Clare Banks. – Traci O’Dea, Restricted Movement

Clare Banks’s poems see deeply into the recesses of the natural world, finding in its teeming flora and fauna—pondweed, cedars, a whitetail, a jay—shades of childhood and familial love. Her landscapes disclose her dead—what Hamlet might have called “honest ghosts,” but which here are something more like presences. The title sequence presents a haunted pastoral, an elegy for a lost sister, which is at the heart of the collection… A brilliant and stirring debut! – David Yezzi, More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems