Ash Steps
Poems
- Publisher
- Cormorant Books
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2012
- Category
- Canadian, Women Authors, Death
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781770860964
- Publish Date
- Mar 2012
- List Price
- $18.00
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Where to buy it
Description
M. Travis Lane's fourteenth poetry title is a meditation on loss and reorientation, continuity and memory. Widowhood and mortality are at the centre of this quiet collection, but fear and self-pity are not to be found here: only a clear-eyed coming-to-terms. Lane's metaphors are unforced, natural yet always surprising: a beggar sitting at the midpoint of a footbridge "like the small bubble balancing/ midway in a plumber's level," trees in a night plaza that "hold/ like dark peaches the late street lamps." Her acute powers of observation are entwined with historical and cultural awareness, attunement to the natural world, and a music that holds it all together.
About the author
As a child, an "army brat," M TRAVIS LANE traveled almost yearly, and had no home town. Educated at Vassar and Cornell, she came with her family to Fredericton in 1960, where they became Canadian citizens. She is Honorary Research Associate with the English department at the University of New Brunswick, a member of Voice of Women for Peace and the Raging Grannies, and has been writing reviews for The Fiddlehead for half a century. Long recognized in Atlantic Canada, M. Travis Lane is finally being acknowledged nationally as one of the country's finest living poets. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Alden Nowlan Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Crossover is her fifteenth poetry title.