A drinker for most of his adult life, Patrick Lane has been a gardener for even longer. At the beginning of this memoir he has been sober for months, by its end for over a year. In that space of time he turns with an addict’s intensity to the natural world, and to words.

As Lane mulches and stakes, lugging shrubs, dragging slate and stones and bags of moss, he reconstructs with stunning clarity his childhood and young manhood. A rhythm builds; the dark holes of Lane’s past, his brother’s death, his father’s murder, draw us on. At times these are so filled with pain that return to the garden is sheer relief. It is also a joy, for Lane’s lush Vancouver Island garden is a place of transcendence as well as grounding.

Author of more than 20 books of poems, winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and a prize-winning story writer, Lane is almost too good at what he does. His lyric, seemingly effortless observations of living things drenched in light and water are mesmerizing. But like the hidden vodka bottles that surface in his garden like stones in a field, potent memories rupture the serene present – of his father going off to war leaving three sons and an angry wife, of a B.C. mining town as deprived and indentured as a medieval peasant village, of a dead baby in a dump. And on the other side of the balance, a portable typewriter and the life force: what it felt like to be a healthy young animal in his own skin.

By the year’s end, planes have flown into Manhattan’s Twin Towers, snow has fallen on the garden, and Lane has asked poet Lorna Crozier, the woman he has loved and lived with for 22 years, to marry him. It is a year of marvels, and this powerfully honest and difficult book is one of them.