The Quiet in Me: Poems

A posthumous collection of poetry from Patrick Lane, compiled and edited by Lorna Crozier.

In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies—the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river—ultimately revealing a tangled web of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.

Together, the poems in The Quiet in Me are a clear-eyed and sharp meditation on existing in a world pulsing between life and death, death and life. When the body is “a museum for what’s gone” and a heart is “the sound of the wind seething,” there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet; the language of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn: “the song of the falling water and wild birds.”

With incredible poetic precision, this collection is an offering—to come back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight, sound and sense. Playing in paradoxes—“empty marrow bones with their strings of red ants”—these poems cultivate dualisms: intimacy and realism, vulnerability and the roughness of youth, a scar that is a father’s teaching, a blade that is a sigh.

From one of Canada’s most lyric writers comes a book steeped in the wisdom of the natural world. Told by an eye that never ceases to observe and a heart that is willing to make itself known—to invite others into its warmth and wilderness—this collection transposes leaf to leaf, stone to stone, reminding us that water will always return to water and so will we.