The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand
The Poetry of M. Travis Lane
Description
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.
Reviews
``The quest for a wider audience for poetry may be quixotic, but this series makes a serious attempt to present attractive, affordable selections that speak to contemporary interests and topics that might engage a younger generation of readers. Yet it does not condescend, preferring to provide substantial and sophisticated poets to these new readers. At the very least, these slim volumes will make very useful introductory teaching texts in post-secondary classrooms because they whet the appetite without overwhelming.''
- Paul Milton
``[A]s someone who only discovered Lane's work with Temporary Shelter in 1993, I appreciate the opportunity to read earlier poems and to glimpse the chronological evoluation of her craft.... Even though this book is aimed at students as well as general readers, with its useful introduction and generous Afterword, in which we meet the poet stepping outside her craft to say what is and has been important to her, the beating heart of it is of course in the poems themselves.''
- Barbara Myers
``Lane's work is comprehensive and thorough with lively images, deep and passionate feeling, provocative thought, and comfortable strength.... Lane... says `poetry is a pleasure with the sound of meaning.' Her work is indeed a pleasure, and it is further pleasure to have it published in the Laurier Poetry Series.''
- Michael O. Nowlan
``Lane presses the belief that the key to significant action is the relinquishing of ego [in her] in a brief but inspired afterword.''
- Paul W. Harland
``Excellently selected and edited by Jeanette Lynes for the Laurier Poetry Series, this tidy text renders Lane's oeuvre accessible to new readers.''
- Kit Dobson
``Lane's poems are regularly capable of disarming their readers with what Jeanette Lynes--in her introduction to the book--calles a ‘willingness to let the odd, the quirky, the eccentric, sing’. The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand exults in a wilderness that is...not always interpretable or scriptable by humanity...Lane's poetics connote a...deferral of...ego to the uninterpretable natural world.''
- Owen Percy
``The aspect I admire most about this selection is the sheer range of Lane's imagination.... Wisdom is found in abundance in this collection.... There are two quotations from the afterword that sum up for me the experience of reading M. Travis Lane. `Mystery, I think, is the cheif subject of poetry' (77) and `a poem is not a message, but a sharing' (79). There is a seeking spirit moving through these poems, and readers will be grateful for what it shares.''
- Ian LeTourneau