The Collected Poems, Patrick Lane. Harbour, 2011.
Patrick Lane is, of course, one of the most well known names in Canadian poetry, and his
Collected Poems affords the opportunity to assess not just his achievement, but his role in the history of our literature. It seems oddly premature to review the career of a poet who is still very much alive and writing poetry, yet he was part of a dominant mode that was particularly Canadian, that emerged in the fifties, and became extremely popular in the sixties and seventies. It was a poetry that was plain spoken, emotionally vulnerable, anecdotal, both sincere and robust in its accounting of human suffering and personal pain, yet able at its best to contain excess in the poise of the ironic turn. This mode of poetry, as it became popular, was practiced in every corner of Canada by a plethora of poets, many of them very good, but the figures of this tradition who will be identified as major poets must include Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, Robert Gibbs, Al Purdy, Gary Geddes, Lorna Crozier, and Patrick Lane.
A reader of Lane’s
Collected Poems will immediately notice that I am focusing on a signature achievement that features the first half of his oeuvre, and, as new types of poetics developed in the eighties, nineties, and the twenty-first century, so also has Lane’s poetry evolved. He is a remarkably flexible poet. Perhaps it is appropriate that I speak of this earlier Patrick Lane, so familiar to us, in this west coast issue of
The Fiddlehead, because the story of this quotidian and conversational form of poetry began in the pages of
The Fiddlehead near the beginning of its history in 1945.
