1997 Available through Harbour Publishing
In this 20-year retrospective of Patrick Lane’s work, readers are given a selection that tends toward sentimental morbidity at its most poetic. While he is celebrated for his pioneering work in West Coast poetry circles and for his wanderer's spirit, we get very little of Lane as the multifaceted writing professional. Instead, the book is tightly focused on a way of thinking, returning again and again to poems in which Lane travels ever-darker paths to murky conclusions. 

Despite the surface ugliness of Lane's material, the work shows a fierce and assured talent. He digs under his own stories to get at the kind of veracity only an interesting life can uncover. One can't help but see the poet himself in these scenes, observing, participating, suffering. The voice of these lines knows too much of the hidden details of what others might assume is the truth. For instance: 

That was the year my wife slept with my best friend. . . 
The wreckage of that world stayed wreckage, though 
we tried to build it back. The steady years of trying, 
her taking the flowers I picked in the fields 
and placing them in a jar where we watched them die.

In the end, this is a collection determined by sex and death and the place where the two come together. It is territory Lane has travelled, and it shows.
—John Degen, Quill & Quire