Overview

This is a beautiful book, both as a series of individual poems and as a single artistic whole-an elegy for someone who died too young, the poet's sister. A keenly observed natural world, including the remembered pathways of childhood and youth, keeps the frank sadness of these poems from despair. Notes on Endings is more than notes-Clare Banks shapes every poem by playing upon a few well-chosen images. And she is especially gifted at finding the unexpected but apt final lines for her poems. Time and again they conclude movingly with a musical cadence, a rightness that is never mere neatness, and that leaves plenty of room for wonder. -Mary Jo Salter

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9781947896833

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Reviews

Clare Banks' first book, Notes on Endings, shows how grief for a dead sister threads itself through every moment of the day and how the world itself becomes its own inescapable memento mori. And yet the consoling gift of Banks' encounters with loss is that she always finds a way to lead us out of the shadows it casts and into the bright ""smack of day,"" so we can ""stand amidst the fact of plane trees."" -Michael Collier These poems are intense and honest reports from the heart's core that juxtapose the detritus of human habitation with the beauty of the natural world. Clare Banks pays keen attention to both inner and outer worlds, tracking a life of spirit, memory, and loss in language that is assured and passionate. She shows us that although the past, along with the loved ones we leave stranded there, is irretrievable, poetry can help restore all that is gone. -Terence Winch

Author Information

Clare Banks is associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have been featured in the The Best American Poetry blog, and in such journals as B O D Y, The Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, and Poet Lore. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by Mississippi Review, was a 2023 finalist in Radar Poetry's Coniston Prize and a 2024 finalist in Iron Horse Literary Review's National Poetry Month Prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series. Notes on Endings is her début full-length collection.

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