Notes on Endings

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