Reckonings

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

Lane is allusive, intricate, and technically ranging, while the abiding impulses of her work remain spirituously generous and affirmative. 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. Reckonings is a very substantial collection which certainly enhances her reputation as one of Canada’s finest writers and brings her work to the wider audience she deserves.

AUTHOR

M. Travis Lane

One of Canada’s most distinguished writers, M. Travis Lane lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She received her B.A. (Junior PBK) from Vassar College, and her M.A. and PhD. from Cornell University. She and her husband Lauriat Lane came to New Brunswick in 1960. Travis taught briefly at Cornell and at the University of New Brunswick and is a Honorary Research Associate with the English department at U.N.B. She is a member of the Voice of Women for Peace and a Raging Granny, a member of the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick and a Lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets.

She has published nineteen books of poetry and two of prose. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in Literary Arts, and the Lieutenant Governor?s Award for High Achievement in Literary Arts. She was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2015.

Reviews

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.