The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand

M. Travis Lane

Description

The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of “home” in both historical and present contexts and reflect on the identity of the woman poet and what it means to be a writer. Lane’s poems exhibit impressive range and variety—long poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual art—and are richly attentive to the landscapes, both urban and wild, of her New Brunswick home. They voice a sense of urgency with respect to ecological crises and war; her poetic attention fixes unwaveringly on the smallest pebble on the coast of Fundy but is equally attuned to global patterns of destructive domination.

In her introduction “As Opportunity for Grace, This Life May Serve”, editor Jeanette Lynes discusses how Lane’s poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artist’s task of mapping her world. Lane’s afterword reinforces her sense of the poet’s project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the “unified disunities” of all things.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 16 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554587377
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand The Poetry of M.Travis Lane
The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand
The Poetry of M.Travis Lane
Selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes and an afterword by M. Travis Lane
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lane, M.Travis (Millicent Travis), 1934- The crisp day closing on my hand : the poetry of M. Travis Lane / selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes; and an afterword by M.Travis Lane.
(Laurier poetry series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-155458-025-5
I. Lynes, Jeanette II. Title. III. Series.
ps8573.a55a6 2007 c811 .54 c2007-906453-1
2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover painting: Glassy Apples (1994) by Mary Pratt, courtesy of the artist. Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction, Jeanette Lynes
The Talisman
Advertisement
Compost
The Song of Lot s Wife
A Stone from Fundy
Well, Viewed by the God
Colonial
Red Earth [excerpt; from Divinations, Book Two]
Walking Under the Nebulae
The Weight of the Real
The House as Sculpture as Chapel as Priest
Six Poems on a Sculpture by lker zerdem
HerThought Lies on It
ALong-thighed Woman in the Sea
DeadWorld to Which My Hands Are Nailed
TheWorld Is Zero
Sisters
As Ifa Made Thing Could Have Life
For the Cenotaph, November 11, 1983
Departures
Whine
King s Landing
The Gift from the Bad Fairy
Skindeep
The Horn That Is So Difficult to Play
You Want Your Truths Told of You
Hills
Local Suite
Riverside Drive
Fredericton Junction
Roberta s Wood Path
Picnic by the River Light
Officers Square
Needham Street
Loyalist Graveyard
Odell Park
Burning the Greens
The Myth of a Small City
About the Size of It
Half Past
Triptych/Tock
Emblem
Henny Penny
Revision
There Are Real Ants in the Metro
Strive for a Deep Stillness
Dusk Sequence
Codicil
Cracked
Keeping Afloat
The Soloist
Tourists
Overboard
For You
Afterword: Those Mysteries of Which We Cannot Plainly Speak, M.Travis Lane
Acknowledgements
Foreword
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada-writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it-finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues-in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media-and there needs to be more, and more different kinds, of publications that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.
Our idea is to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology is much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.
It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners : but they had their being once / and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series helps, variously, to show how and why this is so.
-Neil Besner
General Editor
Biographical Note
M. Travis Lane is one of Atlantic Canada s most important poets. She has published nine full-length books of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Lane s published books are: Touch Earth (Guernica, 2006), Keeping Afloat (Guernica, 2001), Night Physics (Brick Books, 1994), Temporary Shelter (Goose Lane, 1993), Solid Things (Cormorant Press, 1989), Reckonings (Goose Lane, 1988), Divinations and Shorter Poems (Fiddlehead Books, 1980), Homecomings (Fiddlehead Books, 1977), Poems 1968 - 1972 (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973), An Inch of So of Garden (New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1969), and Five Poets (Cornell, 1960). Several of Lane s poems have been set to music.
Millicent Travis was born in 1934, one of two daughters of Colonel W.L. Travis and Elsie Ward Travis. The family moved almost yearly. Millicent graduated from Vassar College in 1956. At Vassar, she served on the editorial board of The Vassar Review. She completed her MA and PhD at Cornell University, where she marked for Vladimir Nabokov, worked as a section leader for M.H. Abrams, and met and married Lauriat Lane Jr. In 1960 the Lanes moved, with their daughter Hannah, to Fredericton, where Lauriat taught in the English department at the University of New Brunswick. Their son Lauriat was born in Fredericton. All the Lanes became Canadian citizens in 1973. M.Travis Lane taught briefly at the University of New Brunswick. She is honorary president of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, and in 2004 she was named a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She is also a member of Voice of Women for Peace and the Raging Grannies. Lauriat Lane Jr. passed away in 2005.M.Travis Lane lives in Fredericton.
Introduction
Write everything. These minutes are your own.
-M.Travis Lane, from Half Past
M.Travis Lane is a poet of impressive versatility and breadth. A practising writer since the sixties and author of nine full-length poetry collections, she is a pluralist in outlook and technique whose work, over the years, has explored civic space, domestic space, wilderness space, and interiorized psychic spaces. I ve long enjoyed Lane s openness to idiosyncrasy-her willingness to let the odd, the quirky, the eccentric, sing-as well as her wit and adeptness at drawing from an eclectic range of aesthetic influences. I admire the risks Lane takes in her poetry, her penchant for taking us to the place where the map gives out ( Half Past ). I also admire the grounded, located textures in her work and its frequent sense of urgency. Brian Bartlett notes as well how M.Travis Lane s poetry ranges far and wide through history, geography, and culture (123) while at the same time turning its attention to moments in that familiar neighborhood [Fredericton] and bestowing upon them the enlarging energy and intelligence of her language (123).Travis Lane s poetic oeuvre is diverse; it includes long narrative poems (such as those in her 1977 collection Home-comings: Narrative Poems ); dialogic poems composed in dramatic structures; spare, epigrammatic poems; ekphrasis poems; and open-form lyrics. Then there are the visual poems and epistolary forms in the opening sections of Divinations (1980). Space limitations preclude reprinting any of Lane s long poems from Homecomings. However, several longer sequences are offered here, so readers can experience Lane s poetic versatility in shorter and longer forms. Poetic sequences are a key aspect of Lane s generative poetics of layering; thus a sizeable sampling of longer serial poems is included here. The poems are presented chronologically throughout this volume to provide a sense of Lane s literary development.
Growing up, as she did, in a military family, Millicent Travis s childhood was marked by a series of shifting landscapes and new worlds. This lifestyle must have necessitated a resourceful adaptability and tolerant turn of mind. In any case, Lane had fully embraced a pluralistic outlook on the world by the time she attended Vassar College: Vassar reinforced my sense of the multiplicity of truths (Afterword). She studied Robert Frost during her postgraduate work at Cornell University, but, as her poems reveal, she has also immersed herself in (to cite only selected examples) Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, the Bible, folktales and fairy tales, classical Chinese art, and tex