![]() ![]() ![]() The penultimate verse returns to the theme of the effects of war which is one of his preoccupations, and I shouldn’t have, but couldn’t suppress a giggle at Banks’s turn of phrase in the line below:Īh, that old napalmic ‘whoosh’, Greek fire, / Protestors burning in / The square, trees of smoke rooted in flame / High above the desert… ![]() ‘Damage’ is a rambling eight page, three section poem with a women called Esther Mercure, who reminded me of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, it has a bonfire on a beach which transmutes into war and gun fire, a lost child who never was (or maybe was – I couldn’t be sure) and a blind match-seller at the train station. The poems here are presented chronologically with the first being from 1973 when Banks was 19 and a student. With apologies to MacLeod, I’ve only had time this week to dip into Banks’s poems. Did Banks consider poetry a young man’s game perhaps? Or did his novels with the actual initial writing part taking around three months of most years after he started not give him time? We don’t know… As MacLeod writes in his introduction, Banks stopped writing poetry in 1981, he doesn’t know why. Banks’s first published work in 1977 was a poem: ‘041’ – more on that below, and he included a few more in some of his novels either entire as the pair that bookend one of his Culture novels, Use of Weapons, or in snatches as in The Crow Road and A Stone of Stone. ![]()
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