The Quiet in Me

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

Together, the poems inThe Quiet in Meare 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 offeringto come back to yourselfandto 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 knownto invite others into its warmth and wildernessthis 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 wonthird place in thepoetry category of the CBC Literary Awards in 1981.

More about Patrick Lane

Archives25:21Patrick Lane on poetry and poets in Canada

Poet Patrick Lane joins Robert Fulford to talk about poems from his collection Separations.

CBC Books5:29Patrick Lane answers the Proust questionnaire on The Next Chapter

Patrick Lane answers the Proust questionnaire on The Next Chapter

Cinq a Six17:37Poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane on their McGill Commencement Speech

Poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane joined us online from Victoria. They share a part of a poem they will jointly deliver Monday June 1st when they receive an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from McGill University.