Temporary Shelter

In Temporary Shelter, Travis Lane demonstrates that she is one of Canada’s finest and most rigorous poets. Yet, she writes with a subtle, sometimes muted, voice and from a position refreshingly removed from current fashion and ideology. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the wildnerness against the city, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection might best be seen as separate illuminations.

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

A new book by M. Travis Lane is something to celebrate. In her latest collection, Temporary Shelter, she demonstrates that she is indeed one of Canada’s finest and most rigorous poets.

Writing from a decidedly feminist perspective, M. Travis Lane resists any easy attempt to order a universe of apparently conflicting patterns. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection form separate illuminations.

As Lane writes in the introduction to this important volume, an image is not an equation, but as Robert Frost suggests, a temporary shelter against the confusion of experiences.