In this 20-year retrospective of Patrick Lane’s work, readers are given a selection that tends toward sentimental morbidity at its most poetic. While he is celebrated for his pioneering work in West Coast poetry circles and for his wanderer’s spirit, we get very little of Lane as the multi-faceted writing professional. Instead, the book is tightly focused on a way of thinking, returning again and again to poems in which Lane travels ever-darker paths to murky conclusions.

The book opens with the image of a dead dog in a field and the eerie sense that this is, in some way, a death to be wished for:

The poor, the broken people, the endless
suffering
we are heir to, given to desire and gaining little.
To fold the arms across the breast and fly
into ourselves. That painless darkness…

The journey that follows is dotted here and there with exactly these kinds of disturbing, satisfying images; an animal skull unearthed, the severed hand of a logger clutching at moonlight, a child’s beating at the hands of his father seen as a kind of communion, farm boys raping a calf, hints of murder and ritualistic torture.

Despite the surface ugliness of Lane’s material, the work shows a fierce and assured talent. He digs under his own stories to get at the kind of veracity only an interesting life can uncover. One can’t help but see the poet himself in these scenes, observing, participating, suffering. The voice of these lines knows too much of the hidden details of what others might assume is the truth. For instance:

That was the year my wife slept with my best
friend…
The wreckage of that world stayed wreckage,
though
we tried to build it back. The steady years of
trying,
her taking the flowers I picked in the fields
and placing them in a jar where we watched
them die.

In the end, this is a collection determined by sex and death and the place where the two come together. It is territory Lane has travelled, and it shows.