In Asian folklore cranes symbolize longevity, immortality, and good fortune. In Winter Cranes, his third collection, award–winning poet Chris Banks conjures these birds when he sees herons near his home towards the end of a long and difficult winter.

For the poet, cranes as a dominant image represent the gaps that exist between what we see and what we feel. His poems explore the impermanence of our modern lives — how our identities are shaped by the past and the present, memory and experience, the physical and the metaphysical. Winter Cranes shows Banks to be an uncompromising poet determined to understand his experience of a world constantly changing around him.