The Quiet in Me 

Order from Habour Publishing $18.95

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. 

"Lyric art of the highest order. The voice, relieved of everything nonessential, speaks with effortless assurance of last, and first, things."
–Jan Zwicky

"Lane is a poet more of the individual, hard-hitting poem; like physical blows, he wields his pieces like small threats of intense beauty."
–Globe and Mail

"...likely to be remembered as a man who fashioned some of the most gorgeously beautiful poems ever written in this country.
–Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Last Crossing and The Englishman's Boy

“The wise and poignant words of a poet who knows he is nearing the end of his life.”

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Lorna Crozier has written about her life with Patrick Lane.

“A powerful, deeply affecting portrait of a long marriage and a clear-eyed account of the impact of grief, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry from one of Canada's most celebrated voices.” 

Available now. THROUGH THE GARDEN
For details and to buy e-book and audio book visit Penguin Random House Canada. 

Hardcover available at link above, as well as at your local independent bookstore.
The audio book is read by Lorna Crozier.

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