LANE, Patrick

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Nationality: Canadian. Born : Nelson, British Columbia, 26 March 1939. Education: Attended Vernon High School, British Columbia. Family: Married 1) Mary Hayden in 1958 (divorced 1967), two sons and one daughter; 2) Carol Beale in 1973 (divorced 1978), two sons; lives with the poet Lorna Crozier, q.v.Career: Worked in sawmills and logging camps, as a house builder and field worker. Since 1966 editor, Very Stone House, later Very Stone House in Transit, Vancouver. Writer-in-residence, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 1978–79, University of Ottawa, 1980, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1981–82, Saskatoon Public Library, 1982–83, and Globe Theatre Company, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1984–85. Special lecturer, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1988–89. Also an artist and illustrator. Awards: Canada Council grant, 1973–74, 1976–78, 1983–84; Ontario Arts Council grant, 1975, 1978; Governor-General's award, 1978; Manitoba Arts Council grant, 1979; Saskatchewan Arts Council grant, 1983; National Magazine award, 1985; CAA award for poetry, 1988; Dorothy Livesay poetry prize, 1996. Address: c/o Oxford University Press, 70 Wynford Drive, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Letters from the Savage Mind. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1966.

For Rita—In Asylum. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1969.

Calgary City Jail. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1969.

Separations. Trumansburg, New York, Crossing Press, 1969.

Sunflower Seeds. Vancouver, Western Press, 1969.

On the Street. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1970.

Mountain Oysters. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1971.

Hiway 401 Rhapsody. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1972.

The Sun Has Begun to Eat the Mountain. Montreal, Ingluvin, 1972.

Passing into Storm. Vernon, British Columbia, Traumerei, 1973.

Beware the Months of Fire. Toronto, Anansi, 1974.

Certs. Prince George, British Columbia, College of New Caledonia, 1974.

Unborn Things: South American Poems. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1975.

For Riel in That Gawdam Prison. White Rock, British Columbia, Blackfish Press, 1975.

Albino Pheasants. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1977.

If. Toronto, Dreadnaught Press, 1977.

Poems, New and Selected. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1978;London, Oxford University Press, 1979; New York, Oxford University Press, 1980.

No Longer Two People, with Lorna Uher. Winnipeg, Turnstone Press, 1979.

There Are Still the Mountains. Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1979.

The Measure. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1980.

The Garden. Toronto, League of Canadian Poets, 1980.

Old Mother. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1982.

Woman in the Dust. Oakville, Ontario, Mosaic Press, 1983.

A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Thistledown Press, 1984.

Selected Poems. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1987; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Winter. Regina, Saskatchewan, Coteau Books, 1990.

Mortal Remains. Toronto, Exile Editions, 1992.

Too Spare, Too Fierce. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1995.

Selected Poems, 1977–1997. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1997.

Conception: 17 Poems. Victoria, British Columbia, Outlaw Editions, 1997.

Short Stories

How Do You Spell Beautiful. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Fifth House, 1993.

Other

(Drawings). Whitehorse, Yukon, Tundra Graphics, 1981.

The Liberal Vision and the Death of Culture (lecture). Regina, Saskatchewan, Library Association, 1983.

Milford and Me (for children). Regina, Saskatchewan, Coteau, 1989.

Editor, Blue Windows, by Catherine M. Buckaway. Regina, Saskatchewan, Coteau, 1988.

Editor, with Lorna Crozier, Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1995.

Editor, with Lorna Crozier, Selected Poems, by Alden Nowlan, Concord, Ontario, Anansi, 1996.

Editor, A Community of Monsters. Victoria, British Columbia, Outlaw Editions, 1998.

Editor, Blindfolds. Victoria, British Columbia, Outlaw Editions, 1999.

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Manuscript Collections: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Critical Studies: "Pine Boughs and Apple Trees" by Marilyn Bowering, in Malahat Review (Victoria, British Columbia), January 1978; Patrick Lane and His Works, Toronto, ECW Press, 1984, and in ECW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Poets, edited by Robert Lecker and others, Toronto, ECW, 1993, both by George Woodcock; "The Poetry of Patrick Lane" by Dermot McCarthy, in Essays on Canadian Writing (Toronto), 39, fall 1989; "How Do You Read a Riddle? Patrick Lane's 'Winter'" by Nathalie Cooke, in Inside the Poem: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W.H. New, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Patrick Lane was born in the interior of British Columbia. The essential center of his poetry is its consciousness of this landscape and mythology: "Because I never learned how / to be gentle and the country / I lived in was hard with dead / animals and men, I didn't question …" If, as Lawrence Durrell says, landscape is character, Lane is a kind of Proteus taking on the shapes of his place, at once fierce and uncompromising in response to its violence and terrible beauty. He writes of logging camps and forests, of bush farming, hunting, and herding cattle, all of which he knows firsthand. Whatever the private complex out of which he writes, he understands violence. He writes of people who survive by manipulating violence—the hustlers, religious bigots, even his father—and of those who have been smashed by it—the derelicts, prostitutes, the murdered child. He speaks without judgment, knowing the cannibal impulse in himself, "that brutal anger that cannot be relieved except on things." Perhaps the most exciting aspect of his work is his ability to write without sentimentality about ordinary cruelty. He also understands the traps of victimization. His poem "What Does Not Change," a long piece about a prostitute, is the frankest and yet most compassionate poem I know about that world. Its language is tough and colloquial, and yet the literary allusions the poet has managed to weave into the anecdotes give the whole a larger reference that makes it a remarkable creation.

Lane has a fine gift for image and writes of the tragic not histrionically but in understatement, deflecting attention to some small detail that is made to carry the full horror of a situation. He has an empathy for all of life that is pained and vulnerable—for the young woman dead from an abortion in a dingy hotel room, for the boy who blows his mother's arm off with a bomb, for the old man who shoves pins into his dead arm trying to cadge drinks.

Lane's talent is multifaceted. He has often illustrated his poetry with his own drawings—stark, haunting images that seem to proceed from a nightmare vision. He has also published a collection of stories, How Do You Spell Beautiful?, most of which are located in the working-class communities of small company towns. He captures the dying towns and their impoverished inhabitants with a precise realism, but it is his lyric images that stay in the mind, as with the young woman wringing diapers at the sink, the "seven-month foetus high up against her heart," who could be the presiding muse of the stories.

In 1990 Lane published perhaps his most powerful sequence, forty-five poems on the theme of winter. It begins, "The generosity of snow, the way it forgives / transgression, filling in the many betrayals." The poems show the mature Lane, still haunted by loss and violence, but with a uncanny gentleness and grace located in the desolate landscapes. Ready to exorcise some of his ghosts, in 1992 he wrote Mortal Remains, poems about the death of his brother and about his father's murder, twenty-five years after the fact. "Poetry cannot save us," he explains, "but it can provide us with some small redemption:" "The wind blows, the branches move / inconsequential, fragile and forgiven."

In his thirty-odd years of writing, Lane's work has made him central to the Canadian writing community. His talent for the memorable encounter led the poet Susan Musgrave, on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday, to collect the poems dedicated to him over the years. An extensive collection, it is an extraordinarily moving tribute to one of Canada's most gifted poets.

—Rosemary Sullivan