Patrick Lane’s newest collection of poetry filters the big questions – about life, death, and all that happens in between – through the soft light of nostalgia. Earnest and unadorned, Lane’s poems are misty-eyed meditations on daily life: work, hunger, sex, madness, rural charms, domestic pleasures, the death of parents, the love of children. Lane negotiates these time-worn themes with the aplomb befitting an award-winning writer of more than 20 books of poetry.

However, The Bare Plum of Winter Rain is not a book that pushes the potential of the genre. More often, Lane is conservative to a fault in his use of syntax, image, and language. This default to the expected transforms “The Macaroni Song,” a poem about a family’s hunger (both figurative and actual), into a narrative of poverty heard too many times before: “We were, what you / would call now, poor. / But when we danced / around the table, / … God, in that moment, / we were happy.”

But though the themes might tend toward the commonplace, there are still surprises in this collection. A word, a turn of phrase, or an image can unexpectedly shift one’s frame of reference. The portrait of the death of the poet’s mother in “The Last Day of My Mother,” for example, inclines toward the sentimental, but is stopped short by the ever-present “smell of her bowels.” Similarly, a poem celebrating a lover’s beauty and sensuality is given the jarring title of “Cunt.”

Sometimes clichéd, sometimes crass, always bold, Lane’s carefully pruned language can, when you least expect it, leaf into meanings beyond the bounds of the conventional. These, the true plums of The Bare Plum of Winter Rain, cling to the imagination long after the rest has fallen away.