The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane [Paperback]

The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Laneis 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. Lanes poems exhibit impressive range and varietylong poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual artand 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 Lanes poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artists task of mapping her world. Lanes afterword reinforces her sense of the poets project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the unified disunities of all things.

``[A]s someone who only discovered Lane's work withTemporary Shelterin 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.''

You Want Your Truths Told of Youby E. Travis Lane

You want your truths told of you

those wavery lines!

Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead

unfolding to an island of wild fern,

of alders, grass, of willow trees,

of slƒ$