The Essential Travis Lane presents a selection of poems by a Canadian poet who combines exquisite observations of the natural world with profound thoughts about time and mortality.

Millicent Elizabeth Travis Lane was born in 1934 in San Antonio, Texas. She moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick in 1960 where to this day she holds the title of Honourary Research Associate for the Department of English at UNB. In addition to having published fourteen books of poetry, Lane's poetry reviews have appeared in a number of publications over the last fifty years, most notably in The Fiddlehead. Her work has been awarded the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Bliss Carman Award.

Travis Lane's profile page

Shane Neilson is a family physician who published his first trade book of poems, Meniscus, with Biblioasis in 2009. In addition to several collections of poetry, Neilson has published in the genre of memoir, short fiction, biography and literary criticism, and his work has been widely anthologized in poetry, nonfiction, and medical journals. In his medical doctor and writing practices, he focuses on mental illness, pain, and disability. He currently acts as editor for Victoria, B.C. publisher Frog Hollow Press. Though he currently lives in Oakville, Ontario, all of his work is rooted in rural New Brunswick.

Shane Neilson's profile page

• Commended, ForeWord IndieFab Book of the Year Award

A sustained voice of unapologetic intellect holds this book of poetry together.

The Essential Travis Lane features selections from the work of an American-born Canadian poet whose talent has remained-according to fellow poet and literary critic Shane Neilson-underappreciated, despite her fifteen published collections and later placement on the shortlist for the Governor General's Award for poetry. Neilson gathers brief, out-of-print poems from Lane's early books, published between 1969 and 1988, that evince a refined ecopoetics alongside spiritual concerns.

Far from idyllic, these poems layer observations of mystery, damaged beauty, and seasonal change with darkness. In Lane's vision, animal imagery contains the potency of omens. A bird's bones hang 'like a ruined leaf,' while a 'crows' wheel' flying overhead brings rain. In a later poem, ravens stand on a shore 'like black chess.' A porcupine 'records the bones.' Water reveals human impact, from rivers that are 'greasy' to a 'chemical marsh' that is inhospitable. Austerity reigns on 'a beach / rubbed clear of diamonds,' with 'frost / cracking the gravestones,' building a portrait of the environment that is at once unforgiving and filled with cold brilliancy. At their best, these poems reveal the complex drama between a wild earth and its inhabitants, folding history and memory into meticulous scenes.

Some language has less edge. Phrases such as 'stairs of marble moonlight' and silent contemplations, including one of children, whose bodies are illuminated by a street light that 'angels them / with sleep,' reveal a painterly approach. Read as the beginning of a larger body of work, however, these moments underscore the poet's willingness to risk the romantic, descriptive turn. When Lane walks the line between graceful and wrought, sheer sonic pleasure often wins out: 'The pale sea quakes / in the lime-belled snares' is especially memorable for its placement of 'quakes' to disrupt the smoothness of the image.

Whether writing on subjects as luxurious as "The Grand Mirrors at Versailles" or as intimate as a single stone, classical biblical figures, or rural memories, a sustained voice of unapologetic intellect holds the work together. It is this quality, more than any specific artistic mode, that distinguishes The Essential Travis Lane. Neilson considers the poet as an outsider in Canadian letters; it may well be the freedom from expectation that has lent these pieces an original, vibrant stance.

Foreword Reviews

'From the outset Lane's verse is musical, sensitive, and difficult. She has never adapted the kind of open and forceful personas so evident in the work of Alden Nowlan, Al Purdy, Susan Musgrave, and Margaret Atwood. Such reserve, such apparent inaccessibility, has cost her a wide readership. One might argue that many excellent poets from the Maritimes have been ignored in the broad national context, but even in that company, Lane's brilliance has tended to be undervalued. If her voice is sometimes distant and even cryptic, her determination to efface herself and foreground the language, the music, and the imagery of her work, means that readers are given an unusally wide scope to move and interpret. Shane Neilson and Porcupine's Quill are to be congratulated for coming as close as they have to reproducing what might be the essence of Lane's work.'

Canadian Poetry