The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

After reading stephanie roberts’ new poetry collection Unmet out with Biblioasis (Spring 2025), I am really impressed not just with the poignancy and abundance of subject matter she covers as a Black-Lantinx poet– intimate partner violence, police brutality, sex and desire, social injustice, the salve of human wonder- but her language is “surprise-drenched’, especially in titles like “Catch a Falling Knife”, “Nothing of the Month Club”, “Love Tests Positive”, “A Left-Handed Scissors for Paul McCartney””.

I forget who said a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but for me, I love poems that begin with the surprise, a good title or an off-kilter image, and roberts’ poems are humming with surprising imagery and terrific titles. Take for instance, her poem “Mall of The Sirens” which appears early in the collection and of which I excerpt only the first part”:

Willows tremble, in from the road,
near water’s lip,
where one would wish to be instead of here
dollar store, drumming in line, humming Hendrix,
holding fridge magnets, plastic daises you don’t want,
a doodad you’d realize doesn’t suit your frame
if you took a beat to let yourself
rise to your own amazement, which is beyond
the atrium’s glass ceiling,
beyond the tang of loneliness
in the storm nestled at heart level.
This is what comes of taking dreams
off the horizon. It is the sun
or nothing else, you would scream
if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.

When so much is designed to break us down–Dollar Store capitalism, systems of institutionalized oppression, the siloing of the human heart– this poem is saying don’t give up. Believe in one’s dreams, or as roberts’ says, “rise to your own amazement, which is beyond / the atrium glass ceiling.” A little daydreaming, a little Hendrix, a little belief in one’s own ability to create in an often hostile unjust world, but if we really believe in the creative act, hidden there among the doodads and the sunshine and the self-doubts, our lives are not just more possible, but become exceptional. 

This is a lesson I need to learn, and relearn, when I read poetry, and I think this lesson is again hinted at in the poem “The Process” in the marvellous lines:

In an empty apartment, you butter
A sandwich on both sides with daydreams.
A memento dropped in cola
Is desire. You reassemble aftermath
Before the whole unravels.

Isn’t that we do as poets? Dream large, and attempt to take one’s life experiences–the failed love affairs and personal traumas, the hunger for meaning and Diet Cokes–and maybe not spin “gold” out of it, but make a way forward, a path that when followed makes the world whole, or if not whole, a little more bearable.

There are allusions to Lolita, Persephone, Ophelia, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, Beyonce and Louise Glück, throughout the book, and I was delighted with all the play of forms and poetic structures—couplets, tercets, uneven stanzas, short poems with only two or three words per line like “Pistol Whip”,  and longer poems branching over many pages like “I Taste Good and Bad”. There are several poems in the collection all entitled “Unmet” which is, of course, the title of the book, and my favourite of the bunch is this particular one:

UNMET

Let me tell you about my mourning
then you can tell me about tree planting.
It’s that magic season
that hasn’t reached you yet.
In shadowed corners
snow stays but already unjacketed
t-shirts breathe like geese like robins.
Monday quiet & empty streets
we will remember spring 2020
with all our suffering.
I had another dream that I was
the confidante of Beyoncé. I woke
under the ocean of it barely saving
myself. Espresso, pinky-tip of honey,
& wanting you beside me.
I was going to get at those taxes
to violate a fine day with drudgery,
but scratch true blue & bird-of-paradise
black. I woke to the picture of you, my lighthouse,
apple tree, ladder, smiling, a radiance like
answered prayer. Shine
in your remote location safe from mask & glove.
My father died yesterday & how on brand,
taking leave in the midst of disaster.
Beyoncé in gold mesh and cornrows, coiled
like a Zambian basket, put a soft hand
on mine. She thanked me and I tried
to pull away. Oh no! Something vibrates
in my throat & tears, You!
I flush under your sun.

I love the “snow stays but already unjacketed / t-shirts breathe like geese like robins” which is fresh and revelatory, and so right. Then there is the allusion to Beyoncé as a dreamy demi-goddess of Black brilliance and creative inspiration, her hair like a Zambian basket a symbol of empowerment and plenty. The poem seems to be saying why get at those taxes when the world awaits? Or when there is a lover who is a “lighthouse, apple tree, ladder, smiling, a radiance like / answered prayer” which is perhaps the only solace or balm when a parent passes from this world.

There are so many terrific lines in this collection that resonated with me like “You could die on the unshared sack of yourself” or “polygraph your mirror” which made this a hugely rewarding poetry collection for me as a reader. stephanie roberts writes in UNMET, “we don’t yet know what we will be made of”, but this fantastic book is a piling on of surprising images and poetic structures and creative desires allowing both reader and poet the opportunity to rise above the Dollar Store desolation and grief and human injustice that plague our society, so hopefully we can remember and reaffirm there is beauty and wonder in the world. 

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.