The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand
The Poetry of M. Travis Lane
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2007
- Category
- Canadian, Literary, Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554580255
- Publish Date
- Nov 2007
- List Price
- $21.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781554587377
- Publish Date
- Feb 2010
- List Price
- $11.99
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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.
About the authors
As a child, an "army brat," M TRAVIS LANE traveled almost yearly, and had no home town. Educated at Vassar and Cornell, she came with her family to Fredericton in 1960, where they became Canadian citizens. She is Honorary Research Associate with the English department at the University of New Brunswick, a member of Voice of Women for Peace and the Raging Grannies, and has been writing reviews for The Fiddlehead for half a century. Long recognized in Atlantic Canada, M. Travis Lane is finally being acknowledged nationally as one of the country's finest living poets. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Alden Nowlan Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Crossover is her fifteenth poetry title.
It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems is Jeanette Lynes` fourth collection of poetry. Her previous collections are Left Fields (Wolsak and Wynn, 2003, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award), The Aging Cheerleader’s Alphabet (Mansfield Press, 2003), and A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway (Wolsak and Wynn, 1999). Her awards include the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and first prize in the Grain Postcard Story Competition. She has been a visiting artist / writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek, and the Saskatoon Public Library, as well as a faculty member of Francis Xavier University and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. She is currently co-editor of The Antigonish Review.Jeanette Lynes grew up on a farm in Alice Munro country while "Son of a Preacher Man" played on transistor radios everywhere.
Editorial Reviews
[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, ARC Poetry Magazine, 60, Summer 2008, 2008 August
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, PoetryReviews, September 2009, 2011 April
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, The Dalhousie Review, 2009 June
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