Iain Banks Rip Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Beard, leather jacket, hair like a blown hen’s nest
Bespectacled socialist, grey-beard-sprouting Banks

Some visited his interstellar anarchic-communist world
He called ‘The Culture’. Others were stung by The Wasp factory.

His grandfather, trades union activitist
Gave him his gritty gene, his skating mother
Supplied the facility to flow into bizarre regions

Boy Banks produced homemade explosives
While little peers played with toy cars

After uni he hitched round Europe
Jobbing as clerk, porter, dustman
Wrote of murder, mutilation, insanity, sadism
A charnel house of very Gothic Horrors

Consider Phlebas, walk down Espedair Street
Join the Player of Games, sail with Canal Dreams
Decipher Feersum Endjinn, its Scots and textspeak.
Look to the Windward with Whit,
Open your mind to the Song of Stone and the Business
Dead Air on the steep approach to Garbadale

He always knew that the State of the Art
Would end in the Crow Road,
Where all men go, against a Dark Background.

Complicity with humbug was never one of his faults
He escaped the Calvinist smit, a lifelong Humanist
Graduated from cocaine to whisky, Raw Spirit of his forebears.

From Banks’s Grey Matter attend to Surface
Transition, which is certain to happen
What form it will take, he already knows the answer
Keeping us in the dark till our own ending.