The Quiet in Me: Poems

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.