The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

The Fredericton poet Nick Thran is an old friend, but that is not why I’m writing a review of his latest poetry collection Existing Music out with Nightwood Editions (April 2025). I am writing this review because I was delighted by the press copy that said, “the poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the ‘sad song.’ The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians–”.

Mixing the lyrical narrative poetic mode with pop music? The speaker’s favourite musicians with a poet’s personal life? I’m in. I love poems which make myriad allusions to favourite musicians, and philosophical perspectives out of pop music lyrics. Indeed, I’ve written my fair share of poems about music–the Replacements and the Pixies and the Violent Femmes–and so has Nick Thran, even way back in his first book Every Inadequate Name from 2006 in a poem entitled “How Pop Sounds”, a poem that deliciously riffs on Philip Levine’s “What Work Is”, and reminds us that pop music “is about falling in love / with something dated.  / About leaving, losing touch, then years / later hearing that same love skewed / in a new band’s blood.”

Love, elation, forgetting, nostalgia? This is what I turn to when listening to pop music, and increasingly in modern poetry collections about pop music. In Nick Thran’s new collection Existing Music, he references musicians from David Berman to The Rolling Stones to indie folk darlings Big Thief from Brooklyn.  However, not all of the poems are about music, or sad music. For instance, the first poem “Cold Enough For Snow” in the collection is about walking, and reading, and being actively ‘present’ in Toronto: 

Is there anything better than arriving
an entire day before your meeting
and walking around Toronto in the rain?

Better than stopping at a couple of cafés to drink coffee
and read a novel about walking around in the rain
in Tokyo? A novel you can easily finish

in one afternoon, if no one talks to you,
if you clear your schedule and commit
to not fantasizing about the lives of anyone

in your peripheral vision, anyone casting a glance
when you look up from your cup, anyone
who might then become the kind of person

you’d feel compelled to try to portray
in a much longer novel. Is there anything better
than steam and rain, and the sound of the pages flipping,

and thinking about calling your mother
because the protagonist is walking
with her mother through Tokyo’s streets?

Rainy day. Untranslatable noises outside. Walking
with this mother you do not yet know, who is not yet
here in the ways we mean when we say that’s her.

Is there anything better than being a total baby
in a café in Toronto, and reading a novel before
you’ve learned to read? Than taking your own hand

like a child’s, like a character in a novel,
and reading the title aloud to yourself,
which is the same title as this poem,

and it’s COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW.

This is a terrific opening poem and there is something about the soothing voice and technical confidence of the line-breaks and tercets that remind me again of Philip Levine, lines like “is there anything better / than steam and rain, and the sound of the pages flipping / and thinking about calling your mother” which contrast starkly with Levine’s iconic poem “What Work Is” which is about standing in the rain in a long line waiting for work, and thinking of one’s brother, and being essentially a little miserable. I love Philip Levine, don’t get me wrong, but Thran’s lines are the more compelling image here: a little rain, a little novel reading, and daydreaming about calling one’s own mother.

But Thran’s new poetry collection Existing Music is still, at its core, about music, and specifically how sad music weaves itself into our lives.  In the poem “Natural Notes”, he writes “Sad music thrives in a drive-through province.” A few pages later in his poem “C/G” about playing a green ukulele, he talks about the lead singer of Big Thief Adrianne Lenker’s voice, how specifically there is “late diner coffees with John Prine in her voice, / the blades of Joni Mitchell’s ice skates.” Still later in his poem “The Minim”, Thran muses, “Four instruments and a live trout / is five instruments.” Well, what does this all mean?

I think it means pop music, or in this case sad music, permeates our lives to the point where our lives take on part of the melody, or certain lyrics become irrevocably bound to a specific time and place for us, which makes figuring out where the world begins and the song ends no longer all that easy to ascertain. At least, not to those of us who care about pop music.

In Thran’s longish poem “The Minim” which I mentioned earlier (Mimim is a noun which refers to a very small time value in music), he collects together an assemblage of short lyrics, and I found another passage which again shows how contemporary music and one’s life bleed together, or at least for a poet like Nick Thran:

A small private orchestra
is hard to define. It’s the most remote line
of the manual. Not a melody at all,
but a series of ever-changing
colours in the cafés,
in the bathysphere—
fine print
in the peppermint tea.

In Nick Thran’s Existing Music out soon with Nightwood Editions (April 2025), the poet Thran takes the details of his personal life and riffs expertly on pop music, small talk, clouds and dead poets, as if searching for the tone or the melody that the lyric imagination might take a little comfort in, and thereby produce a chorus of truth and understanding to haunt those of us lucky enough to have read this powerful new collection. 

I really loved this book, and I really hope I have understood what the poet intends by blending pop music and his personal life together, but I kind of imagine Nick Thran grinning when reading this, smiling at what I got right and what I didn’t, which reminds me of that earlier Thran poem “How Pop Sounds” from his first book Every Inadequate Name which ends:

You don’t know shit, you want to say.
You don’t know how Pop sounds.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.