Poet Jan Zwicky calls the work,"Lyric art of the highest order. The voice, relieved of everything nonessential, speaks with effortless assurance of last, and first, things.”

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Literary Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. His more recent books include Witness: Selected Poems 1962–2010 (Harbour Publishing, 2010), The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011), Washita (Harbour Publishing, 2014; shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award), Deep River Night (McClelland & Stewart, 2018) and a posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me (2022). Lane spent the later part of his life in Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier. He died in 2019.

Lorna Crozier is the author of the memoir Through the Garden, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She has published eighteen books of poetry, including God of Shadows, What the Soul Doesn't Want, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky, which won the Hubert Evans Award for Creative Nonfiction. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for Inventing the Hawk and three additional collections were finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She was awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received five honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian literature. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia.

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Trevor Corkum: The Quiet in Me pulls together the final collection of poems by Patrick Lane, one of the country’s great poets, and your partner in life. What does it mean for you to see this collection come together?

Lorna Crozier: Holding this book in my hands feels like a small miracle has taken place and Patrick is back in the world again. He’s been dead three years now, but his voice is still alive, speaking poems no one has heard before. It’s as if he’s able to talk between two worlds or through an open window that connects where we live and where he is right now.

TC: We learn from the introduction that some of the poems were unfinished at the time of Patrick’s death, but that you assisted in the editing. Can you talk about that process a little more?

LC: A few months before Patrick died, he handed me a folder of papers and said, “I might have a book here. What do you think?” I read the poems, and as I’d have done in the past, made a few editing notes. Mostly I wrote “Wonderful” in the margins, but there were suggestions too, some big, some small. He didn’t get well enough to return to the poems and revise them so I had to do that, go into the work and try to see it with his eyes to polish those earlier drafts. I tried to remain true to his voice and his intentions and make as few changes as possible.

TC: These are powerful, sometimes quiet poems, filled with darkness and grace. One senses a deep grappling with questions of mortality and afterlife. Did the two of you have an opportunity to talk through the work? How did Patrick approach these final poems?

LC: When I first read the poems, I didn’t see the shadow of his death cast across the pages. Maybe I was in denial. We were both hopeful that his bewildering illness would finally get diagnosed and there’d be a treatment if not a cure. Now when I look at the book, I don’t know how I could have missed the dark notes, the sense that the writer’s life was coming to an end. I think now that the presentiment of time about to run out gives the work an amazing resonance and poignancy. But he and I didn’t talk about that.
TC: Behind the collaboration, as you mention, are many decades spent sharing and reading each other’s work. That seems a rare and powerful gift, to share so creatively within a partnership and romance. Can you talk about the ways you influenced one another’s practice?

LC: One of the ways Patrick’s poetry influenced mine was that both he and his writing were models for me. I know no one else more passionate about his art, more committed to pushing himself to learn and grow, to never rest on his laurels. His dedication and practice left me confident that we were doing the right thing, writing poetry, though there are few tangible rewards. We pushed each other, I think, to make the poem the best thing it could be and to be true to our own stories, the small lost places we came from, and the voices we remembered and heard around us. He was a tough editor—so was I—and we benefited from our cold, objective eyes in the editing of our work. At the same time, there was an utter admiration of each other’s writing and there was our love for one another.

TC: What do you think Patrick would make of the collection, seeing it head out into the world at this particular moment?

LC: It’s my hope that Patrick would be pleased with the title, the book design, and the poems themselves. They’re his last messages to the world he loved and lived in, his final grace notes to dragonflies and hummingbirds and turtles and otters and cats. It’s his voice and it’s still speaking and I hope he hears it with deep pleasure and surprise. I hope it’s a gift for him as it is for those of us who will read it.

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LITTLE WOLF
                        
Even the wolf spider hides from me who would save it.
The ice melts, a liquid ribbon by the sprung door.
At Little Hell’s Gate the Overlanders watched the river
break their rafts to pieces, a single blanket,
white with three Hudson Bay bars, a soggy floating island
somehow saved three miles south below Poplar Flats.
And written down so we would remember their joy. So,
I walk the hall each night in search of what’s been lost,
come down to pleading with a wolf spider for its life.
How mad am I? At the elder tree I took my face
in my cupped hands and offered it to the wind.
My poor mouth could taste the salt from the bay. In God’s name
how did I live those years in the canyon a century after
their struggle? I remember bowing to a chocolate lily on a scree,
wishing its life free of our desire to ruin such beauty, the Overlander
women wailing, cups and saucers broken, the little they had of the past,
the blue fragment of English china I found in gravel
below the Gate where the waters break at last.
And who will break me now that I am broken?
Little wolf who weaves no web, who hides from me,
come to my hand that I might be made free.
                        
* The Overlanders, a group of around 150 settlers, travelled from Fort Garry, Manitoba, to the Cariboo gold fields of British Columbia in the 1800s. Little Hell’s Gate is the name given to the narrowing of the canyon through which the North Thompson River flows.     
        
Excerpted from The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier ed. (2022) with permission from Harbour Publishing.