The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

I have been dipping into Ian LeTourneau’s latest collection Metadata from a Changing Climate for the last week, out with Gaspereau Press (2025), and this book really does a wonderful  job of employing economy of language, while at the same time, super-charging its imagery in mostly tightly controlled short poems. A porcupine is a “Punkrocker of rodents”; a murmuration of starlings is a “flashmob”; clouds “fingerprint the river”, and sun bouncing off waves is likened to “flashbulbs at a gala opening.” 

I’m not really one for the mantra “small is beautiful” in poetry unless it is somehow elevated by stretching one’s imaginative thinking with smart, energetic and perception-revving imagery, and LeTourneau really brings the goods with this collection.   

Take for example, his short poem “Wood Pile” which is a title so apt for this particualr website that I cannot help but give myself over to this poem entirely. Watch what the poet accomplishes in 10 short lines:

Wood Pile

Autumn pours gasoline across the yard,
crimson maple leaves fall and catch,
their drying edges curl like flames.
Split and stacked, a mosaic of jumbled
wedges divides backyard from backwoods.
A heap of splintered ideas, no two alike,
blueprints for waltzing tall ships.
Seasoned by wind for months, the profit
is combustible; the plaid of heat and smoke.
A branch plant for solitude, off grid.

Really, the first two lines are kind of ordinary, but they form a solid base for the third line where the poem starts to become quite combustible. I like the idea of all the red leaves falling on the ground, curling in “like flames.” Then the wedges of wood “split and stacked” divide “backyard from backwoods” which really feels like a line conjured from my own childhood as I can almost smell the chainsaw oil and the sawdust in the air. The poet LeTourneau then turns up the imagination with the wood-pile being a stand-in for human consciousness, a “heap of splintered ideas, no two alike”, but this imaginative thinking moves quickly to “blueprints for waltzing tall ships” which, at least for me, is an implied metaphor for what poetry ultimately does: invents order, something majestic that can cross oceans. A short, but satisfying poem.

The middle section of the book is a sequence of ghazals called “Metadata From A Changing Climate” which is where the title of the book comes from. I think what I like best about this section is that it deals with climate change, but also doesn’t hit the reader over the head with it. These are poems about observation, as much as estrangement, and I really liked the tight couplets–their pared down, bare-bones meaning-making–which is something I know from experience is very hard to do well; it can be done, but to make it new when you are dealing with only four or five or six couplets takes patience, and real rigour, and often a little luck. My favourite poem from this section is the second ghazal which is dedicated to the late poet RM Vaughan:

2.
     for RM Vaughan  

The ferryman’s boat.
Cold, indifferent water.

Breeze disturbs the reflection of branches’
a polygraph squiggle on the river.

A birch tree, loosening bandages
of grey, copper, white.

Clouds swob at the water;
starlings tangle their flightpaths.

Time alters one letter at a time.
Lost…loss.

At the river’s edge, we ask why.
The river whispers why not.

This poem engages the reader immediately blending as it does a classical allusion to the River Styx with a view of the St. John River in New Brunswick. Here the poet is remembering a friend, and much loved, deceased poet RM Vaughan, but it too reminds us people do the remembering, and not the “Cold, indifferent water” which can maybe reflect the loss we feel, but not feel it in the way the poet does as he projects his grief onto “A birch tree, loosening bandages of grey, copper, white.” The personification of Time altering one letter at a time is a very evocative idea, and provides the kind of gravitas needed to pull of the next line “Lost…loss.” I really like this ghazal, and the ending is particularly satisfying the way the river sort of whispers/echoes/rhymes the poet’s grief.

Beyond grief and and nostalgia, LeTourneau really is a poet of quiet observation who seemingly embraces a ‘poetics of entanglement’ as the back copy of the poetry collection teases, but what is entangled in the poems he creates? I would say a deeply humanistic tone, fresh images that make the thing being observed unfamiliar and new again, and lines and poems which are more often than not, rather short but sharply rendered. The last poem I excerpt does all of these things, and is entitled “Thirteen Ways of Looking At Memory” evoking the ghost of Stevens:

Thirteen Ways of Looking At Memory

The glow of a candlelit vigil. Weeds
growing from concrete. A pair of pink
mittens hanging on a tree branch. The hush
of baby chipping sparrows when their mother
leaves the nest in search of food. Squares
of sunlight sliding across bird’s-eye
maple. Thunder cracks the sky into shards
of stained glass. The shock of orange,
a dead fox on the exit ramp. A silverfish
escaping from the collected plays
of William Shakespeare. A forest emerges
from the pointillism of trees. I once kissed
Lady MacBeth, offstage. Crows scatter
at the approach of cars, revealing 
the twinned curves of a deer’s ribcage,
exposed like cupped hands around a match.
The freedom of the unreliable narrator.
The future tense of philosophy.

Some really terrific lines here like “A forest emerges / from the pointillism of trees,” and strong contrast, too, like the glow of a candlelit vigil bumping up against “weeds growing from concrete” or “a dead fox on the exit ramp.” LeTourneau’s gift is for entwining the deeply felt, and human, with an indifferent Nature, and his observations are always rich and revivifying even with climate change looming in the margins.

I really enjoyed Metadata from a Changing Climate, out now with Gaspereau press, because the poet Ian LeTourneau takes the small scene, or the acutely observed in nature, but bends it, makes it transformative, without overwhelming the reader with extraneous detail, and I think this keeps the reader attuned to the permutations of his poems. It illustrates through his observations that our climate may be changing, but it is not just Nature itself, but the nature of reality, too, which is raw, malleable, and in the hands of a talented poet, it is a powerful redemptive tool.  

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.