The Quiet in Me
CBC Books | | Posted: January 12, 2022 10:19 PM | Last Updated: October 18, 2022
Patrick Lane
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. (From Harbour Publishing)
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Patrick Lane was an award-winning poet and novelist. He was the author of several books of poetry, along with works of fiction and nonfiction. Lane won many awards including the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award and three National Magazine Awards. In 2014, he was made an officer of the Order of Canada. Lane died at the age of 79 in March 2019.
Lane won third place in the poetry category of the CBC Literary Awards in 1981.