Böcker av M. Travis Lane

Like 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 a book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in our literature. Yet, M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, and it's here that her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. Lane's poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources and imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen reach their highest expression in the long poetic form. There are few that match her brilliance. This exquisite volume brings together, for the first time, the complete collection of Lane's long poems. Together, they offer an astounding journey through five decades of imaginative space and time.

The poets of Atlantic Canada are as pre-eminent today as they were in the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. This vitality is the inspiration for Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. Coastlines showcases half a century of poetry by sixty of the region's finest poets, beginning with the acknowledged greats: Nowlan, Acorn, and Thompson. Among the diverse voices are Elizabeth Bishop, Douglas Lochhead, Anne Simpson, Al Pittman, and Tammy Armstrong. Powerful poems by 2001 Governor General's Award winner George Elliott Clarke are included, and works by recent finalists Lynn Davies, Don Domanski, Sue Goyette, and Carole Langille. This astonishing range makes Coastlines an expansive reading pleasure.

A new book by M. Travis Lane is something to celebrate. In her latest collection, Temporary Shelter, she demonstrates that she is indeed one of Canada's finest and most rigorous poets. Writing from a decidedly feminist perspective, M. Travis Lane resists any easy attempt to order a universe of apparently conflicting patterns. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection form separate illuminations. As Lane writes in the introduction to this important volume, an image is not an equation, but as Robert Frost suggests, a temporary shelter against the confusion of experiences.

In 1969, M. Travis Lane published her first collection of poems, An Inch or So of Garden, a chapbook which at once proclaimed her as a sure and sophisticated poet. Lane is allusive, intricate, technically ranging, while the abiding impulses of her work remain spirituously generous and affirmative. Through Poems 1968-72 (1973), Homecomings: Narrative Poems (1977) and Divinations and Shorter Poems, 1973-78 (1979) she expressed a powerful religious imagination in which as W.H. New has written, "the processes of revelation are more central to the proems than are any messages about society or self. Understanding, if not order, remains of consequence to her." 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. Though Divinations won the Pat Lowther prize in 1980, M. Travis Lane's work has been sparingly reviewed and has not reached the audience it deserves. Reviewing Divinations in 1981, Guy Hamel concluded: "I think it is important for the sake of her career and of Canadian letters that she be given a more just recognition than in my judgement she has yet received." with the advent of Reckonings seven years later that recognition may at last be granted.