Night Physics

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

M. Travis Lane’s poetry cannot be read without a broad smile, yet at
the same time she plumbs hearts with the most commonplace and profound
observations. Wit parries with wisdom, the classic combination of
instruction and delight. Her subjects are legion: self-knowledge, love,
death, war, and the ubiquitous Canadian winter. She does not shrink from
making demands on her reader. The punning flagship poem, “Anachronic
Gant Music,” a Mozartian demi-drama, requires familiarity with Peer
Gynt, the Marx Brothers, and Peter Pan. Here Groucho, Chico, and Harpo
as the three Kings anchor a tour de force (“The game’s afoot ...
What ho, a Watteau!”), leaving a “goat-footed collie” alone on the
stage. For those who prefer less-experimental work, Lane is as
comfortable with nature as with cumbersome cities, sparing one moment,
luxurious the next with Shakespearean descriptions of a hapless man in
the woods: “Better he should go mousely; creep / flat as a dry leaf;
write / on snow calligraphy / of his own diary doings; claim / only a
single errand run; / report: one nut.” Like its best fellows, her
poetry begs to be read aloud, curled over the tongue: “The daisy in
the sky, round; / passionately dumb, / that crackles like the butter in
a pan, / spitfire, has creased the glacier dawn.” A seasoned veteran
in her field, Lane has paid her dues in divine madness tempered with
human sensibility, happily apparent in this inspired and meticulous
work.