What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered

In January 2001, Canadian poet Lane emerged from two months in an addiction treatment center, sober after 45 years of steady, heavy drinking and drug use. He had to learn to live with a raw new self at age 62, and this book, part memoir, part diary, told month by month, chronicles his first year, retrieves his past and records the seasonal cycle of the garden he tends on Vancouver Island. Lane's parents were both alcoholics from mill and mining towns where heavy drinking and family brutality were normal. His impressionistic memories, painful and poetic, probe the secrets of his younger self. Lane's now-dead mother, beautiful, overworked with five children, unfaithful to his father during WWII, a gardener herself and quite mad for part of her life, haunts him literally—he sees her in the garden at hallucinatory moments—and at the end of this extraordinary year he brings himself to forgive her. The signal event of this period is Lane's marriage in August to his longtime companion, poet Lorna Crozier, but readers will find that almost incidental to Lane's remarkable nature writing: animals, birds and insects, flowers, moss and trees are as vivid as memory. Agent, Kathryn Mulders . Author tour . (Sept.)