The Quiet in Me: Poems

by Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier (Introduction)

Overview

A posthumous collection of poetry from Patrick Lane, compiled and edited by Lorna Crozier.

In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies—the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river—ultimately revealing a tangled web of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.

Together, the poems in The Quiet in Me are a clear-eyed and sharp meditation on existing in a world pulsing between life and death, death and life. When the body is “a museum for what’s gone” and a heart is “the sound of the wind seething,” there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet; the language of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn: “the song of the falling water and wild birds.”

With incredible poetic precision, this collection is an offering—to come back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight, sound and sense. Playing in paradoxes—“empty marrow bones with their strings of red ants”—these poems cultivate dualisms: intimacy and realism, vulnerability and the roughness of youth, a scar that is a father’s teaching, a blade that is a sigh.

From one of Canada’s most lyric writers comes a book steeped in the wisdom of the natural world. Told by an eye that never ceases to observe and a heart that is willing to make itself known—to invite others into its warmth and wilderness—this collection transposes leaf to leaf, stone to stone, reminding us that water will always return to water and so will we.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550179811
Publisher:	Harbour Publishing Company, Limited
Publication date:	10/25/2022
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He worked at a variety of jobs, from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life was spent as a poet. He was also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Literary Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. His more recent books include Witness: Selected Poems 1962-2010 (Harbour Publishing, 2010), The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011), Washita (Harbour Publishing, 2014; shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award), Deep River Night (McClelland & Stewart, 2018) and a posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me (Harbour Publishing, 2022). Lane spent the later part of his life in Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier. He died in 2019.

Lorna Crozier has received numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award, for her fifteen books of poetry, which include The Blue Hour of the Day, What the Living Won’t Let Go, Everything Arrives at the Light, and Inventing the Hawk. She is also the author of the memoir Small Beneath the Sky and the editor of several anthologies. She lives in Saanich, British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Last Words 8

Living in a Phantom Hut 11

Hummingbirds 12

Bitter 13

The Breath 14

Chuck Berry and Cherry Blossoms 15

A Christmas Poem 16

Cobalt Blue 19

The Elder Tree 20

Thumbprint 21

Carefully 22

Ellington & Vera Lynn 23

Small Elegy 24

Enkidu, Waiting 25

False Creek 26

Fog on the South Shore 27

Icebergs off Fogo Island 28

Kintsugi 29

Little Wolf 30

Blueberry Hill 31

Lacrimae 32

Love, Too 33

Morning 34

The Mosque of the Drop of Blood 35

Moving, Day 36

Ötzi 37

Periphery 38

Poverty Sutra 39

The Quiet in Me 40

Road Crew, August, 1956 41

It's Finally Friday 42

Salt Burner 43

Salvation 44

Slick 45

The Sea Is Our Home 46

Snow 47

Suicide 48

This Way 49

Wild Dogs, 1959 50

Without Art and Waiting 51

Ash 52

Om 53

Lookout 54

How Many Times Have I Taken Out My Death? 55

Fragments 56

Acknowledgements 59

About the Author 61

Editorial Reviews

01/09/2023

In this beautiful, posthumous collection by one of Canada’s greatest contemporary lyric poets, Lane (Deep River Night) memorializes a life spent in poetry while navigating the fragility, limitation, and wonder of an aging and frail body (“a museum of what’s gone”). “Old misfortunes,” Lane (1939–2019) writes, “can bring an old man peace.” There is, indeed, peace in this work, the peace of “ordinary miracles” and “the line of silk across an apple branch.” Complementing that calm is intimate knowledge of loss, “dust and fragile webs,” bodies that are “all parchment skin and rickets.” These poems pair limitation with beauty, offering the grace and wisdom of awareness of one’s own mortality, in which the “fragile blossom” serves as a stark and apt metaphor. “We pray,” Lane writes, “because we cannot turn away.” This final collection takes one last glance at the turning world, keeping its heart and eyes wide open and rewarding readers with its rich lyricism and movingly articulated truths. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Lyric art of the highest order. The voice, relieved of everything nonessential, speaks with effortless assurance of last, and first, things."–Jan Zwicky

"Lane is a poet more of the individual, hard-hitting poem; like physical blows, he wields his pieces like small threats of intense beauty."–Globe and Mail

"...likely to be remembered as a man who fashioned some of the most gorgeously beautiful poems ever written in this country."–Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Last Crossing and The Englishman's Boy

From the Publisher