The Quiet in Me: Poems

In this beautiful, posthumous collection by one of Canada’s greatest contemporary lyric poets, Lane (Deep River Night) memorializes a life spent in poetry while navigating the fragility, limitation, and wonder of an aging and frail body (“a museum of what’s gone”). “Old misfortunes,” Lane (1939–2019) writes, “can bring an old man peace.” There is, indeed, peace in this work, the peace of “ordinary miracles” and “the line of silk across an apple branch.” Complementing that calm is intimate knowledge of loss, “dust and fragile webs,” bodies that are “all parchment skin and rickets.” These poems pair limitation with beauty, offering the grace and wisdom of awareness of one’s own mortality, in which the “fragile blossom” serves as a stark and apt metaphor. “We pray,” Lane writes, “because we cannot turn away.” This final collection takes one last glance at the turning world, keeping its heart and eyes wide open and rewarding readers with its rich lyricism and movingly articulated truths. (Oct.)