Selected Poems, 1977-1997

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

By the time Patrick Lane published Poems New and Selected (a 1978 volume
that might be considered a companion to the one under review), he had
acquired a reputation for writing poems about violence, including sexual
violence and even bestiality, thus provoking an extreme reaction from
Louis Dudek, who reviewed it under the title “The Poet as Rapist” in
The Globe and Mail. This response was perhaps understandable—after
all, it was a period in which such subjects could still be designated
“unpoetic”—yet at the same time it was unfair, since Lane was also
the author of poems of mystery and delicacy, including the well-known
“Albino Pheasants.”

Both the violence and the delicacy remain in the present selection.
There is, for example, another poem involving bestiality, along with one
about a man who severs his hand in a sawing accident five hours away
from medical help. Yet there are also gentle, graceful poems, including
one called “The Beauty” about antelope “[g]oing nowhere / and
going there / Perfectly in the snow.” Lane is well aware of the fact
that the world we inhabit is both a cruel and a beautiful place; he duly
writes about both aspects.

But what strikes a reader most forcibly about these poems is that the
language is as pure and serene in the tough, violent poems as in those
that stress beauty and fragility. Lane is in some respects at the
opposite extreme from Al Purdy. There is little of the colloquial or the
conversational in his verse—and, above all, he never strains after
sensational linguistic effects. His style is eloquent, restrained, and
translucent, and the poems are all the more effective as a result. The
whole book is unified by the staid dignity of its language, and
individual poems are both stunning and unforgettable.