Arc of Light by Lorraine Gane
A daughter’s warm-hearted acuity and a poet’s impeccable cadence are combined to create Lorraine Gane’s tender poems in honour of her mother. Arc of Light (Raven Chapbooks, 2020), Lorraine’s new book of poetry, is an exquisite artifact to hold and behold. The tactile nature of the hand bound book with its end papers of tamarind leaves honours the intimacy of the poems within. The poet’s grief is ongoing as there are reminders all around her and yet symbols and signs in the natural world connect her to the consolation of something larger.
With the wonders of technology, you can join Lorraine for the official launch of her new book, Arc of Light,
on Monday, November 30th at 7 p.m.
sponsored by the Salt Spring Island Public Library.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88948023447
Arc of Light is a limited edition of one hundred copies, hand stitched using the Japanese ribbon method, with endpapers that feature delicate leaves from the Tamarind tree along with bits of field grass on mulberry-based paper. It’s a gorgeous presentation and design for a suite of twenty beautifully written elegiac poems.
Each of the poems has a quote from it on the facing page which adds further honour to each one. I found “The White Heron” especially poignant as the poet writes of herons she would never see again.
That summer my mother and I sat
talking in the living room about death
while afternoons unfolded into
the deep hues of evenings, our breath
taking us there, moment to moment.
In “The Rose,” the poet writes of a rose she brings to her mother’s “darkened room” where she hopes her mother will smell the fragrance.
“On the day she dies,” the poet gathers up the “spent petals and carries them
four-thousand kilometres to this room.
Now, nine months later,
they still […]