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 bodiesthe trout in the lake geese arriving with the wind a raccoon fishing in a riverultimately 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 cleareyed and sharp meditation on existing in a world pulsing between life and death death and life When the body is quota museum for whats gonequot and a heart is quotthe sound of the wind seethingquot there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet the language of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn quotthe song of the falling water and wild birdsquot With incredible poetic precision this collection is an offeringto come back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight sound and sense Playing in paradoxesquotempty marrow bones with their strings of red antsquotthese poems cultivate dualisms intimacy and realism vulnerability and the roughness of youth a scar that is a fathers teaching a blade that is a sigh From one of Canadas 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 knownto invite others into its warmth and wildernessthis collection transposes leaf to leaf stone to stone reminding us that water will always return...
