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 hold
some of their sweetness.
In “Early Morning Omen” the poet narrator finds the “black folded wings” of a dead bird on the forest path. Later in her room she sees her mother’s face.
. . . my mother’s face
floats between blackness and shimmering light.
“Arc of Light” is the final poem in the collection. The lines lifted to float on their own on a white page are:
She was already lifting from the body
that could no longer hold her here
Photo of Lorraine Gane: Diana Hayes
As Lorraine says in her acknowledgements, “The poems in this collection were written out of necessity, an integral part of grieving the death of my mother.”
In an email announcing her launch, Lorraine wrote about the trips she took to Toronto from Salt Spring Island to visit her mother Mary (1924 – 2014). “In the summer of 2014, she died in a west-end retirement home after her second stroke. After her funeral and the closing date of our family home of fifty-two years, I flew back home to Salt Spring Island. My life seemed profoundly changed in many ways. I began writing about what I was going through in my journal and in poems about my mother’s last year, which seemed necessary and critical to my grieving process. With each poem that arrived on the page a bit of the loss I was feeling was released. Finally, after five years, I finished a poem about the arc of light hovering over my mother as she lay in her bed the day before she died (the arc was clearly visible in a photograph I’d taken for my youngest brother’s birthday). The poems felt complete.”
My father Bob Moore also died in 2014, in the fall, in Kelowna, B.C. It was October 19th, the day after Lorraine and I did a reading from our new books of poetry. Hers was The Blue Halo and mine was Fishing for Mermaids, both published by Leaf Press. Our friend Diana Hayes organized the reading at the Salt Spring Library along with our publisher Ursula Vaira.
Lorraine mentors writers around the world through online courses, consultations, workshops and manuscript development/editing. You can visit her website at www.lorrainegane.com.
The amazing cover photograph “Moon Over Wilson’s Bowl,” is by Diana Hayes who is a poet as well as a photographer. The book design is by Pat Walker Graphic Design and Rainbow Publishers.
You can order copies of Arc of Light, Poems by Lorraine Gane via www.dianahayes.ca/chapbooks-published/
Raven Chapbooks is an independent press located on Salt Spring Island, B.C. and was founded by Diana Hayes. This family venture first began in the late 1990s as Rainbow Publishers with five full-length titles released to date. The press has now turned its focus to poetry chapbooks featuring new and emerging British Columbia poets.
The mandate for Raven Chapbooks is to create beautifully designed chapbooks in small editions and to support the poets by providing a launching pad for wider audiences. Diana Hayes has always been supportive of poets in a myriad of ways, as long as I’ve known her, and I congratulate her on this exquisite creation and I congratulate Lorraine for sharing her elegantly crafted poems with us all.
