Notes on Endings

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Notes on Endings</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 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.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> -Mary Jo Salter</span></p><p></p>