Old Mother

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

Patrick Lane is an accomplished poet who received the Governor-General’s Award for his Poems New & Selected (1978). He has been writer-in-residence at a number of Canadian universities, including Ottawa and Alberta, where he worked on this collection.

Old Mother is a remarkable collection of vigorous, vital, and deeply disturbing verse. Lane’s is a poetry of experience, which exploits startling images and a constantly shifting perspective in its explorations of savagery and death, and man’s relationship to his past and to the natural world.

The volume is divided into three sections; the first, “Prairie Poems,” begins and ends with poems that identify the female eagle with the spirit of nature and the underlying meaning of human experience. “Old Mother,” which is a sort of invocation to a savage muse, ends with the line “I keep the point of your talon deep in my heart.” Awareness is shocking and painful, but the alternative is to live a lie, a half-life which ignores the dark underside of where we came from and what we are. “The Mother,” which ends the section, describes the brooding female’s preparations to feed her young on her own flesh.

“The Weight” presents the more personal world of the poet’s individual and family history seen in the context of history. Here again Lane is concerned with savagery and pain, history and death. Those who refuse awareness of their participation in these things, like the “tourist from new hampshire” and the young at Maple Creek, are incapable of hearing “the languages surrounding her the wildness singing” and unable “to find themselves who were lost” because “it has not lived in their hearts.”

“The China Poems” are the most beautiful in the volume, each one presenting a vivid image of contemplation. Lane’s sense of the immense history of the people around him informs his perception, and the poems continually draw the past into the present. Thus the deaths of the workers who built the Great Wall parallel the death of the cicada in “Tour Bus” and the speaker in “The Dream of the Red Chamber” tells us “I search for the ancient in the clutter of dynasties.”

Taken as a whole, this is a fine collection of poetry, filled with images which resonate with passion and clarity. It is a worthy successor to Poems New & Selected.