M. Travis Lane

Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for PoetryA Quill & Quire Best Book of the YearLike the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in literature. M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, in which her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. There are few that match her brilliance. This volume collects all of her long works — most of them now out of print — from a five-decade commitment to the art. M. Travis Lane has long flown under the radar of Can Lit, crafting luminous poems and sharp literary criticism — much of it published in the Fiddlehead, one of Canada's premier literary journals — but in recent years her work has been drawing the attention it deserves. Evidence of this recognition is her 2015 Governor General's Award nomination for Crossover, a collection the still-vital poet published at the age of 81. Her poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources, imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen launch her into the company of such poetic luminaries as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn. In the long poetic form, these qualities reach their highest expression. This volume, an exquisite collection that brings together her long poems for the first time, constitutes an important addition to the canon of Canadian literature and to the canon of feminist literature in North America.

An award-winning poet, M. Travis Lane has also been one of Canadas most productive literary critics over the past fifty years, having contributed several hundred reviews to Canadian publications. Heart on Fist includes a generous selection of her most essential pieces. A perceptive and fearless writer, Lanes trenchant critiques span a wide cross-section of English Canadian poetry and Quebecois works in translation. This volume brings together for the first time early considerations of Milton Acorn, Al Purdy and Michael Ondaatje, with close readings of Judith Fitzgerald, George Elliott Clarke, Ann Simpson and A.F. Moritz, as well as recontextualizations of avant garde writers like Margaret Christakos and Jay MillAr. One of the few women of her time to develop and maintain a critical voice in Canadian letters, this is a landmark book at a time when readers are increasingly looking for diversity in their literary journalism.

The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of ""home"" in both historical and present contexts and reflect on the identity of the woman poet and what it means to be a writer. Lane's poems exhibit impressive range and variety - long poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual art - and are richly attentive to the landscapes, both urban and wild, of her New Brunswick home. They voice a sense of urgency with respect to ecological crises and war; her poetic attention fixes unwaveringly on the smallest pebble on the coast of Fundy but is equally attuned to global patterns of destructive domination. In her introduction ""As Opportunity for Grace, This Life May Serve"", editor Jeanette Lynes discusses how Lane's poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artist's task of mapping her world. Lane's afterword reinforces her sense of the poet's project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the ""unified disunities"" of all things.

Atlantic Canada is enjoying a renaissance unknown since the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada features work by 60 of the region's finest poets in a volume that will whet appetites for more. The earlier poetry renaissance began in 1945, with the establishment of The Fiddlehead magazine. In this new volume, the present Fiddlehead editor Ross Leckie, and his collaborators Ann Compton, Laurence Hutchman, and Robin McGrath, showcase the lasting effects of that earlier renaissance and confidently forecast that the newest generation of Atlantic poets will help to make poetry a pre-eminent literary form in Canada once again. Coastlines provides expansive reading pleasure because of the astonishing range of poetic intelligences it represents and the myriad ways poets find to work and rework the topography of Atlantic culture and landscape. The earliest poems in the anthology were written in the 1950s by the acknowledged greats — Acorn, Nowlan, and Thompson — and by Alfred Bailey, Elizabeth Bishop, and Charles Bruce. The collection also features work by senior poets such as Kay Smith, M. Travis Lane, Fred Cogswell, and Douglas Lochhead, and mid-career poets such as Elisabeth Harvor, Harry Thurston, and John Steffler. Poets of the post-1995 renaissance include Anne Simpson, Sue Sinclair, Michael Crummey, and George Elliott Clarke, who won the 2001 Governor General's Award; Lynn Davies, Sue Goyette, and Carole Langille have all been recent finalists, and both Brian Bartlett and matt robinson have won the Petra Kenney Memorial International Poetry Prize. The newest voices in Coastlines belong to Tammy Armstrong and Geoff Cook, whose work was selected from manuscripts published in 2002.

In Temporary Shelter, Travis Lane demonstrates that she is one of Canada's finest and most rigorous poets. Yet, she writes with a subtle, sometimes muted, voice and from a position refreshingly removed from current fashion and ideology. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the wildnerness against the city, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection might best be seen as separate illuminations.

Lane is allusive, intricate, and technically ranging, while the abiding impulses of her work remain spirituously generous and affirmative. Few contemporary poets have her command of tone, able to shift from intense intellectual attention to private joy, from the ironical to the lyrical. This is poetry both demanding and magnanimous. Reckonings is a very substantial collection which certainly enhances her reputation as one of Canada's finest writers and brings her work to the wider audience she deserves.