“Lyric art of the highest order. The voice, relieved of everything nonessential, speaks with effortless assurance of last, and first, things.”
The Quiet in Me is 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.
Join Lorna Crozier as she reads pieces from this powerful collection while enjoying a gourmet dinner in the company of old friends.
ABOUT THE POETS
Patrick Lane was one of Canada's pre-eminent poets, winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and three National Magazine Awards. His distinguished career spanned more than fifty years. He wrote twenty-five volumes of poetry, as well as award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction.
He lived and travelled extensively around the world and his work has been published in a number of countries, including England, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, China, Japan, Chile, Colombia, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Russia. He was writer in residence and teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the University of Toronto in Ontario. Patrick Lane most recently lived near Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.
An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn't Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island.
REGISTRATION
$65 + HST includes poetry reading and gourmet dinner. Tickets are limited to 25 so that we can safely and joyfully enjoy the evening.
If purchasing a ticket for more than 1 person, please enter the number of tickets required as the “Quantity” and you will be charged accordingly.