Reckonings: Poems 1979-85

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In 1969, M. Travis Lane published her first collection of poems, An Inch or So of Garden, a chapbook which at once proclaimed her as a sure and sophisticated poet. Lane is allusive, intricate, technically ranging, while the abiding impulses of her work remain spirituously generous and affirmative. Through Poems 1968-72 (1973), Homecomings: Narrative Poems (1977) and Divinations and Shorter Poems, 1973-78 (1979) she expressed a powerful religious imagination in which as W.H. New has written, "the processes of revelation are more central to the proems than are any messages about society or self. Understanding, if not order, remains of consequence to her." Few contemporary poets have her command of tone, able to shift from intense intellectual attention to private joy, from the ironical to the lyrical. This is poetry both demanding and magnanimous. Though Divinations won the Pat Lowther prize in 1980, M. Travis Lane's work has been sparingly reviewed and has not reached the audience it deserves. Reviewing Divinations in 1981, Guy Hamel concluded: "I think it is important for the sake of her career and of Canadian letters that she be given a more just recognition than in my judgement she has yet received." with the advent of Reckonings seven years later that recognition may at last be granted.