The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane (Laurier Poetry) - Softcover

Lane, M. Travis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554580250 ISBN 13: 9781554580255

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

M. Travis Lane is Honorary President of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick and a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has published eleven books of poetry (including the forthcoming The Safety Net) and received numerous awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Prize, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts.

Jeanette Lynes is an associate professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University and co-editor of The Antigonish Review. She is the author of three collections of poetry; her fourth poetry book and a novel are forthcoming in 2008.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

You Want Your Truths Told of You by E. Travis Lane

You want your truths told of you―

those wavery lines!

Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead

unfolding to an island of wild fern,

of alders, grass, of willow trees,

of sharp dams in the silty sand

where a barefoot girl stands

to watch a cattle barge

rock, like a cradle in the wind.

She can not tell them where she stands,

her nude toes turning blue as clams

in the murky water where it chafes

the green facts into islands―

shoals, reefs, whirlpools, naked trees

scoured by the ice.

Her plain nouns bell their inner folds

like a coiled spring uncoiling

or like eggs

that tremble in her hand and beat

their shells with razor bills and spread

out wings.

Their shadows cast on the millstream float

on spinning water for all time,

never entirely truthful.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554580250
• ISBN 13: 9781554580255
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 102
• Editor: Lynes Jeanette