Scarsdale - Dan O'Brien (CB Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Scarsdale.  Dan O'Brien.  CB Editions.  London, England.  2014.

Back in October of 2013 Today's book of poetry was happy to look at Dan O'Brien's first book of poetry War Reporter.  We loved it.  You can see that here:
http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/10/war-reporter-dan-obrien.html

We weren't alone.  War Reporter won the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collections Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

O'Brien is best known as a playwright, but his second volume of poetry, Scarsdale, will tilt those scales in the poetry direction.

The first thing you notice about O'Brien's poetry is the confidence of the speakers voice.  Scarsdale is a family history, right of passage, coming of age collection.

Blue Nun

How sophisticated, brave
we thought they both were to drink
Blue Nun. While my mother cooked
joylessly, and the old man
watched the news. Considering
her mother would beat her when blind drunk,
and his mother had been trying
to join his father in death
for years, once stepping our of bed
into a shattered ankle, drunk. You must stay
away, they'd warn us. They stayed away,
too. Except those rare evenings
when for mysterious reasons
she'd park outside the pricey
wine store downtown, to purchase
her bottle of Blue Nun -- what I like
to imagine they first tasted
in somebody's basement
in high school, or the evening
of their so-called elopement
upstate somewhere. She'd sip
over the bubbling gray ground meat
in the crowded pan. Her eyes wet
with some kind of inward, chastised
release. And sometimes he'd bring his
next glass to the table
and tell such funny stories!
that she'd watch him with both fear
and pleasure: here was man
she hardly knew.

...

There are poems of sons and fathers and mothers and booze, they are about the journey towards manhood, the struggle to find, know, and follow a path.

O'Brien is exacting when crafting these freeze frames of family function and dis.

His tyrant father pounds a straight rod of frustration down O'Brien's back at every turn.  Life is revealed as it honestly unfolds, dramas of domesticity, generally with much duress.  But there is poetry to it all as O'Brien's mother intones in the poem "Pay Phone":
 
          "One day you will remember
when you were brave and suffered,
and you will find yourself longing
to be this way again."

The Worm

Alone in the boat
with you, rowing out
on the lake. Take
the Styrofoam cup
and with my fingers
dig through the fecal
loam. For night crawlers,
blood suckers. His cold
striated, mucoid
skin, pink bulbous band
like a prepuce. You
show me how to hold
the naked, the tangling
thread, then push the barbed
hook through. Once, then, twice
till the bait's a balled
crucifix of dirt. Don't
be a faggot,
you say as you cast
your line out. I drop
the live worm between
my bare knees, puncture
its middle, watch its
hermaphroditic
tail flipping blind. Ooze
spotting the wood grain
green. Then casting out
the loose loop, I see
my poor worm sinking
beneath the rhythmic
lozenges of light. Such grace
when the hook comes back
clean. One time I left
the worms on their hooks
and smiled when I saw
you searching the house
for the source of all
that smell of death.

...

These poems are simple but never simplistic, direct as darts from a knowing hand.

Today's book of poetry thinks Dan O'Brien's second book of poetry, Scarsdale will confirm the incandescent promise of his first, War Reporter.

My Mother

Water in the bowl after
the flowers have been lifted out.

...

There is a gentle nature to O'Brien's hard and harsh voice, an eloquent survivor of the battle to become more than a son, to become a man.  Equally important, a man of understanding and compassion.

Dan O'Brien

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan O’Brien, author War Reporter (CBe 2013; winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for a first collection of poetry) is an American playwright and poet living in Los Angeles. His play The Body of an American, derived from the same material as War Reporter, won the Horton Foote Prize and the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, and had its European premiere in London in 2014.

BLURBS

‘Dan O’Brien’s poems are powerful and stripped down, but they expand in the mind long after they’ve been read. As in War Reporter, O’Brien captures the reflective gentleness that exists amid the damage of experience, and survives it.’
– Patrick McGuinness

‘Dan O’Brien’s direct and sometimes stark but never simplistic poems explore the difficult complexities of boyhood, and growing up, and growing older. The painful loveliness of O’Brien’s language reveals the confusions and aspirations of the self, and the self among others, and the perilous world beyond the self.’
– Lawrence Raab

‘Dan O’Brien has found what Frost once called “the sound of sense”, has caught the language of people, stripped that language to its bare bones, rattled those bones in ways that make a wrenching but beautiful music. Moving through his American childhood into adulthood, through a wide world shattered by broken people, he finds redemption everywhere and it’s a gift to his readers. O’Brien supplies the satisfactions of a rare imagination at work, a poet who has taken risks, exposing his deep anxieties, finding himself again and again.’
– Jay Parini

Dan O'Brien

reads "Fern Hill" a poem by Dylan Thomas

Video courtesy of:  Cossack Review

cbeditions.com

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom - Thomas J. Erickson (Parallel Press/University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries)

Today's book of poetry:
The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom.  Thomas J. Erickson.  Parallel Press.  University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.  Madison, Wisconsin.  2013.

(This one is for Luba)

I don't know Thomas J. Erickson but I'd certainly like to.  My sister-in-law, Ann Marie is a lawyer and one of the wittiest people I know.

One of my closest and dearest and oldest friends, Michael Thompson, is a lawyer and is also the smartest person I know, and one of the funniest.  Thompson introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut when we were teenagers along with a number of other important discoveries.

But Erickson is the first lawyer who has written a book of poetry that I've read.  More importantly the first lawyer to write a book of poetry that I love.

Dead serious and tongue in cheek, Erickson's The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom is intelligent, funny, sad and enlightening.

Speaking in Tongues

I smoked a blunt and drank too much bumpy
face so I called a johnny cab to take me to my baby
mama's crib. I saw a brother kickin' it. He said he
got a couchy-coupon from my lady. I said do you
know what time it is and he said it's time for some
drama so I took out my strap and busted a cap
on his ass.

These words -- in their doomed vibrancy -- literally
mean: I smoke a marijuana and cocaine-laced cigar and
drank too much Seagram's Gin. I called an anonymous
phone number and told them where I was. A few minutes
later, a car picked me up and I gave the driver five dollars.
I told him to drive me to the mother of my child's house.
I saw a guy on the corner who told me that my girlfriend
had propositioned him for sex. I challenged him to a duel
and he accepted. I pulled out my gun and I killed him.

Eventually, I will argue to the jury the following:
My client had a drink with friends. He called a taxi
to take him home to his family. On the way home
he encountered a long-time enemy of his who spoke
rudely about my client's girlfriend. The man pulled
a gun on my client. My client killed him in self-defense.

I explicate, obfuscate, mitigate, equivocate --
the translator of a story of death.

...

Most of these poems are set within Erickson's legal world of trials, criminals and legal process, but what is most clear is that regardless of what sort of lawyer Erickson is -- he is one hell of a good poet.

It is evident that Erickson has the tools to write about anything - for now the world of a lawyer and his orbit provide sufficient material for Erickson to shine.

Word

     Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
     -Susan Sontag

I walk into a video store and ask the clerk
if they have I'm Not There. The clerk
checks his computer and says, "No,
but we have I'm Not Scared." His tone
is expectant and hopeful and it makes me feel
bad to tell him that while it sounds close,
it's not the movie I wanted.

I represent drug clients with the given first
names of Kilo and Easy Money, who sell
teenagers (one-eighth grams of heroin) to teenagers.
I have two teenagers.

Until a few years ago, I thought the term fitful sleep
meant a good night's sleep. Now that I know
the true meaning, I'm not sleeping so well.

HIDTA (pronounced high-da) is an acronym
for High Density Drug Trafficking Areas
which is an anti-crime task force. My client keeps
complaining that Al Qaeda is after him.
I think he means HIDTA.

When Kafka read The Trial to his friends
for the first time, he laughed so hard
that there were moments when he couldn't
read further. I, for one, do not think
the alienation of modern man is so funny.

...

With quantum leaps of logic and reason Erickson people's his sad stories with famous poets, Franz Kafka, even "drunk Mike" shows up.

Parallel Press/University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries consistently publish chapbooks that we here at Today's book of poetry admire.

The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom got a big thumbs-up from everyone in our office including Elliott, the office gopher, who generally only reads poets with a "P" in their name.  He knows everything there is to know about Purdy to Pound, Pratt to Paz.

Sweating the Bottle

     Even a lawyer carries in him the debris of a poet.
     -Flaubert

I love to push down the brown
paper bag to get to the mouth
of my forty and I love to screw
the cap back on after every swig.

It is the morning after a crackling
trial. I'm thinking about my gnome
of a client with his beady-black eyes
and salt-and-pepper beard -- the kind
of beard that comes right up to the eyes
like a mask.

The morning dew has covered my car
windows like a gauzy cocoon. I
hear a dog howling with the conviction
reserved for strangers.

While we waited for the verdict, my client told
me he had molested the boys for years.
He told me this because he knew
he was going to walk and it was time
to let me in on the joke.

I take the empty bottle and knead
the moist sides until the glass is warm
and the tiny droplets fall and pool
together and now I have enough
left for one more drink.

...

Erickson's all too brief The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom has more to it than just poems that brush with the law, it is full of promise.

Here is a poet we will want to hear much more from at Today's book of poetry.  These poems raise the bar.

And if I am ever in trouble in Milwaukee, Erickson will be the first person I call.

Thomas J. Erickson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas J. Erickson was born in 1960 and grew up in Kohler, Wisconsin.  He received a BA from Beloit College in English Composition and a law degree from Marquette University.  His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Review, Quiddity International Literary Review, Mad Poet's Review, The New Poet, and Slant.  He is an attorney in Milwaukee, where he is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets.  He is the proud father of Charles and John.

Thomas J. Erickson

Reads his poem "The Breathing Lesson"

Video courtesy of: Gerald So

parallelpress.library.wisc.edu

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Paper Radio - Damian Rogers (a misfit book/ECW Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Paper Radio.  Damian Rogers.  a misfit book/ECW Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2009.

There are a few people whose opinions about poetry make me pause and take notice.

If you read this blog with any regularity you'll know that Stuart Ross (Small Press Poetry God) is a poet I look up to.  He is my friend and when he tells me to read something it brings a new urgency to the task.

Another person I listen to is Bardia Sinaee (Poet/Editor/Publisher of Odourless Press).  On one of my rare visits to Toronto I was in a secondhand bookstore with Bardia and asked him what I should read. We had been milling over an excellent and vast selection of poetry - he was without hesitation and handed me Paper Radio by Damian Rogers.

I loved it.

That was a few years ago.  As always, Bardia knew what he was talking about.

You cannot imagine my delight when Today's book of poetry got a copy of Paper Radio in the mail from ECW Press/a misfit book.  The arcane rules of Today's book of poetry only allow me to write about books sent by publishers/poets, none that I purchase.  Now I can tell you about one of the books I have enjoyed with relish but was unable to share.

Don't Look

It's like when you eat sour candy,
how the sugar-coated acid
twists your tongue into a knot.

At the Ambassador Roller Rink
no one would slow-skate with me.

A boy rolled over to you during the power ballad
and I turned into a pillar of salt.

No, that's wrong. I mean, I felt a lot like a sand dune. Or like
that baby food jar our family member filled with volcanic ash.

I asked the DJ to help me prove I knew the secret moves
from transforming my body into four different letters --

Y: raise your hands to the sky.
M: touch your shoulders like a mountain range.
C: pull your belly toward the door.
A: place your palms over your head and pray.

He said no. He said we don't play that song.

I said oh. I said wait, hold on;
I am changing into someone
completely different and better.

...

Paper Radio was shortlisted for the 2010 Relit Awards and the Pat Lowther Award.  And for good reason.  These poems are electric, fully charged bullets.

Roger's dexterity and intelligence spew out in machine-gun bursts of ideas.  Monster slaying lines like this: "because you woke up hating yourself and thought of me" from the poem "One Lie".

Lines like this stop me in my tracks.  Paper Radio has a stream of consciousness feel that tapers down to laser precise insight at Rogers' whim.

In The Back of a Cab

I lean my body against the door
of a car I'll never ride in again.

In the long line of stores and restaurants
I'll never visit, your name blinks
on a sign that says it has your pizza.
I've never found my name
on any sign, in any city.

So many people move around me,
invisible within the labyrinths
of skyscraper and subway.
They can't know how I planned to save us all
with the secret of human happiness,
which just this morning
I held in my hand like a rock.

But today was too long --
now all I remember is
a few lines from a song,
something about 20,000 roads,
how they all lead back to me,
here, alone in a stranger's car

in the middle of the night,
secretly hoping the driver
who politely pretends I don't exist,
would devote the rest of his life
to taking me home.

...

You, dear reader, will be like me.  So entirely in love with and swept up by these poems.

Okay, a bit out of left field, but these poems, this book, left me feeling somewhat like I'd read one of Jerzy Kosinski's better novels.  Please know the high esteem I hold Kosinski in.  And it is just a feeling, like you've been in a conversation with someone whose intelligence has covered you like a blanket and you hope to hang on to some of that wise warmth.

Milk and Honey

A cardinal flits through the branches
and the bush appears to burn.

Who are we to say we were thrown out?

We fell asleep,
the garden withered.

We turned our eyes inward
toward our dearest lies.

After weeks of late snow
last year's daffodils shove up
beside blue and white hyacinths.

The grass is so green it's shocking.

This may or may
not be true:

I'm only here
to sing for you.

...

Paper Radio gets Today's book of poetry highest ratings.  Coach House Press with be launching Damian Rogers' second book, Dear Leader, on March 24.  Rogers' has also recently been named Poetry Editor for Walrus magazine.

Damian Rogers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto where she works as the poetry editor of House of Anansi Press and as the creative director of Poetry in Voice, a national recitation contest for Canadian high-school students. Her first book of poems, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

BLURBS

“Damian Rogers’ troubled teens, ecstatic utopians, and distracted deities are evidence of a powerful poetic storyteller. In Paper Radio, nature has multiple personalities, perception sits at the table with emotion and superstition, and meaning speaks in dark, mellifluous tongues. This is a poetry of attack and decay, of synchronicity and sleight-of-hand, alive with sudden, vertiginous moments of clarity. It’s rare to find a young poet so deeply invested in both her own experience and the reader’s pleasure. A splendid, memorable debut.”  Kevin Connolly

“In Paper Radio, Damian Rogers emerges as a poet of startling clarity, intelligence, toughness, and tenderness. Her gifts for aphorism, for sudden swift changes of mood and perfectly rendered emotional landscapes, are those of a dramatist. There is not a dull moment in this book — and while that alone is a high accomplishment in this age of dullness, Rogers keeps us awake to a purpose. She keeps faith with the premise of the lyric, which is that, by speaking most truly from the self, we are able to reach others and stay awake to this business of being human together.” —April Bernard

The poems in Paper Radio are very brave. Many tend to look at the past with a real understanding that there is so much there that will never be made right. But what makes them brave is the way they pivot and then drive on with hope because, well, they have to. —Joe Pernice

“Sometimes memories are so distant, we only remember them when an old friend reminds us of those last events. Damian Rogers is such a friend. She tells us of dreams that sound like our own, shooting little arrows of insight that split the heart to reveal the shocking vulnerability of life. Paper Radio is a jewel of a book that you will want to read over and over and over again.” —Greg Keelor

Damian Rogers

reading from Paper Radio

video courtesy of ECW Press

ecwpress.com 

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Some Talk of Being Human - Laura Farina (A Stuart Ross Book/Mansfield Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Some Talk of Being Human.  Laura Farina.  A Stuart Ross Book.  Mansfield Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2014.

Of course I like every book I post on Today's book of poetry - that's the entire point.

So how do I tell you when I enjoy something just a bit more than usual?  It's been a while since a book of poetry has made me smile in quite this way.

These witty poems have the dead-on timing of a stand-up comic and the genuine sincerity of a well meant sermon.

Some Talk of Being Human hints at being naive but Farina is only being coy.

Peterborough, Late Spring

The sky is the three chords
you know on the guitar.
Repetitive, rhythmic light.

Under it,
those well-written streets,
sagging like couches
on student porches.

Tangled sheets
contain our sweat.
This is known as evidence.

A record spins and spins.

The shadows we cast
on Hunter Street
lug instruments
in awkward cases.

This day is like performing
CPR with a cold.

I swear there was a shortcut,
but I can't seem to find it.
If we walk home the long way,
will you promise not to talk?

...

This book is from Mansfield Press's imprint A Stuart Ross Book - and that should come as no surprise.  These poems have some of the same perplexing and spectacular leaps of faith as those of Stuart Ross, no mean feat.

Farina has been a poet I've adored reading since meeting her back in 2007.  This Woman Alphabetical is a Pedlar Press book by Farina from that period, if you can find it you should pick it up.  It is simply marvelous.

But - not quite the gem Some Talk of Being Human turns out to be.

Poem after poem twists your maw into a different sort of smile.  Some of them will be new twists of fate for your face.

Family Reunion

The sandwiches are crustless!
The salads have layers!
Each woman knows by heart
a recipe called Heavenly or Dreamy or Delightful.
Major ingredient: marshmallows.

Uncle Ralph pulls up
in his white Lincoln Continental.
His two tanned legs
wander down from white shorts
to two white socks pulled parallel.
He opens the passenger door to reveal Aunt Barbara
already laughing.

Uncle Harry tells a joke about
a beautiful woman on the streetcar
but we don't get it.
Auntie Marilyn Todd tells us
she changed our mothers' diapers.

A stooped aunt I don't recognize
calls me by the name of my dead grandmother
and for a moment I see
the spaces in the crowd
were also invited.

And then it's darker
and their voices in the dark night
are a memory of the war,
how they saved their liquor ration--
so sure it would end--
held a victory party
on this very spot
sang these very songs
before they settled down
to invent our parents.

...

This is dead serious whimsy of the best kind.  These poems engage you in a conversation you end up responding to.  You start answering asked questions out loud.

Farina's Some Talk of Being Human is so thoroughly engaging, so sad-sack romantically human, I loved it.  Plain and simple.

Passed it around the office, now all the interns are clamoring for my copy of This Woman Alphabetical, which won the 2006 Archibald Lampman Prize for the best book of poetry by a poet from Ottawa.  It's going to the highest bidder.  They will be allowed to read it  -  in my office  -  after they finish the dishes.

The Waiter Brings Our Order of Hummus

There was good news today
about the future of bangs.

It is not as bad as we'd imagined.

My knee touches
your knee
under the table.

Our eyes meet
over grilled pita wedges.
Crumbs dandruff
from my mouth;
my fingers trace beige lines
on the table that dreams
of being rustic.

When I think of the number of times
I've wished I could draw.

When I think of the number
of sketches of you
I could have sold at craft fairs,
looking out a submarine window
or caught in a moment with a fox.

Do you remember that time we went up a mountain?
Or just after,
that time we came down a mountain?
All those miraculous days, my darling.
All those incredible journeys.

...

Today's book of poetry enjoyed Some Talk of Being Human as much or more than anything we're read this year.

If I were making a list, this book would be on it.

Laura Farina

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Farina's first book of poetry, This Woman Alphabetical (Pedlar Press, 2005), won the Archibald Lampman Award, given to the best poetry book published in Ottawa. She grew up in Ottawa and then gradually made her way west. She now lives in Vancouver.

BLURB

  -  On This Woman Alphabetical:

"A brisk, engaging read. ... Farina's poems are refreshingly under-done, with an innate sense of the

energy and spontaneity of lyric. ... At her best, Farina plucks the tenuous line between contemplation and irreverence. There is something of Frida Kahlo here: the obsessive image-making: the mediations on personal pain; the surrealist impetus. Or of Georgia O'Keefe, in the poems' deceptively simple clarity."

      - Triny Finlay, Arc

mansfieldpress.net

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Washita - Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing)

Today's book of poetry:
Washita.  Patrick Lane.  Harbour Publishing.  Madeira Park, British Columbia.  2014.

Most of us are familiar with the poetry of Patrick Lane - for those of you who aren't - Mr. Lane is one of Canada's most respected and admired poets.

Patrick Lane has published over 30 books of poetry, Washita is his latest.

It's masterclass stuff.  These poems are piano-string tight and sing with a particular melody.

You never have to look far in a book by Patrick Lane to get to the heart of the matter.  Lane's poems often make me think of Raymond Carver's poetry, more for the effect on the reader than technique, but for me both men have a similar density and depth.

Bokuseki

Iris blades cut through the last ice on the pond.
Emblems of endurance, they are what a man knows
who asks of the grey clouds they witness his passing.
I don't know where the water goes, remember the thin creek
I drank from when I lived in that cabin by the sea.
The doe grazed among fallen apples in my yard.
When I shot her she hung for a moment in the sky.
There were days back then I lived without regard for life.
Forgiveness comes hard.
Each year I rake the leaves and burn
the winged seeds of maples in the flames.
I kneel by the pond and ask where I am going,
what it is I must do. Bokuseki, these iris blades in ice.
When the rain dries on my palms it leaves the trace of Gobi dust.
Each night I breathe a far desert, vestiges of the fall.

...

"Bokuseki" is a type of "ink painting", like calligraphy, done by Zen monks in a meditative state.

This poem, a graceful response to death, guilt and mortality.  Lane doesn't fool around.  His poems have weight.

For physical reasons Lanes' process was altered for this book.  The resulting poems were carved out of hard wood, as a result, the sparse language that much more tempered by flame.  The reader is the winner in this dilemma, the ensuing poems are as tight as spooled wire.

For The Woman Who Danced
     With The Ashes Of Her Son

Strange how beautiful when we are diaphanous,
a bit of ripped muslin set against the sun, the wind
soft as a child's skin. Tragedy does that to us
and we are made the greater for our smallness.
A bright pebble among the discarded shells.
There are times I am a questing mole, fierce
in my love, lost as anything alive.

...

You can think of these reflective poems as meditations - but they are never sermons.  Lane continues to vigorously investigate what it is that makes us so unfailingly human, continue to uncovers what it is that might make us beautiful.

Solstice Coming

Typing with my left forefinger today. The poem is immensely slow,
one letter, one word, one line at a time. This and then this and ...
amazing how the images slow to an intimate crawl,
each word a salamander peering from beneath a stone.
The fish this winter are wraiths, the pond's perfect thoughts.
I have tried to love this quiet as the hours pass through me.
It is rare to feel anything deeply. My life is a feast if I allow it to be.
The slow rain falls without cease. It eats the ice, one drop at a time.
These days my body breaks down and I cannot lift my right arm.
My poems now are thin as I was when I lived in the mountains.
I tried to believe the lake when I came down from the high snows.
I watched the water for a long time from the safety of the trees.
It was a trout rising made me see what a day is, a ripple only.

...

Patrick Lane is not worried about spilling a little blood, he understands the cycles that life takes. That red flowing off of his hand and into both the earth and the ether where his poems become part of both.

Lane is a giant and we are lucky to have his big shadow, his beautiful poems.

Patrick Lane

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

BLURB

"like physical blows, [Lane] wields his pieces like small threats of intense beauty."

     - Globe and Mail

Patrick Lane

Calgary Spoken Word Festival, 2008

video by: ciswf

harbourpublishing.com 

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.