Patrick Lane often greeted poets in the reception area of Honeymoon Bay Lodge  on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, when he led poetry retreats there. He’d also help carry our luggage to our rooms. I was remembering that about Patrick, who died in March 2019, when I went to a retreat with Lorna Crozier earlier in April 2022.

Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, B.C. in 1939 and grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC interior, primarily in Vernon.  He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, received several honorary degrees, and in 2014 became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

When Lorna did a reading on one of the evenings at the retreat in April, she had a few of us read poems from Patrick’s posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me, which she compiled following his death.

Lorna said  when putting the poems together for the book, she chose the first and last poems and then figured out, by putting them on the living room floor, which poems belonged beside one another in the collection. It was an intuitive process as she chose poems “that want to slide between the sheets together.”

The first poem in the book is “Living in a Phantom Hut” which begins: “A wolf-hair brush in a yellow jar, a pool at dawn, / Basho on the road to the deep north.”

The speaker in the poem reflects on the Japanese haiku master  Basho  and notes the Barriere River, one of the main tributaries of the Fraser River in British Columbia. The classic poets and northern B.C. were significant to Patrick’s life and his poetry.  And Basho is the name of one of his cats still living as far as I know. (Basho was eighteen in 2017 which is the year noted at the beginning of Lorna’s memoir Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats).)

Each line of “Living in a Phantom Hut” says so much about the end of one’s life and the peace that may be found there. “Old  misfortunes can bring an old man peace,” the narrator says.

“There is nowhere I can go where I haven’t been” is the second to last line. The poem closes with “when I hold the brush to my ear I hear the moon,” referring back to the master poet Basho.

In the copy of Patrick’s memoir, There is a Season, that he inscribed for me, he has written an inscription to include the last half of a Basho haiku: “We are all the bamboo’s children in the end.”

In the last poem of The Quiet in Me, “Fragments,” the speaker is referring to “woodshed litter, / bits of bark and dust, fragments of fir and hemlock” and then, in the heart of the poem: “a barefoot child lights a fold of paper.”

“Seventy-three years will come to add to his seven,” the speaker says of the boy and he wonders what he can tell him.

In her introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna wrote about Patrick’s love of “the creatures and flora of the world.”  She said, “as he lay dying, he ached not for himself but for the loss of caribou and whales and owls and salmon. He bemoaned the clearcuts and the forests burning in his home province.”

Patrick wrote of hummingbirds, “bees and the fat birds calling,” cherry blossoms, elephant seals, geese and beetles and eagles mating.  A special tree for him was “The Elder Tree” where, as he wrote, “ I come to pray.”

The narrator notes the turtle that “rose/ from the pond’s heavy dark to heal her winter shell” and remembers his father planting trees. “How long ago the fathers, their stories another kind of cure.”

The Quiet in Me was launched on Zoom  on April 22, 2022, with Patrick’s long time friend and publisher, Howard White, hosting.   The event was organized by ZG Stories and sponsored by Munro’s Books in Victoria.

Friends of Patrick’s read poems and Rhonda Ganz, designer of the magnificent cover of the book, read “The Elder Tree.” She said “I wouldn’t be a poet if it weren’t for Patrick Lane . . . “ She mentioned Lorna Crozier too, with gratitude. Rhonda knew about the particular tree in the poem and Patrick did set out to show her where it was one day but then changed his mind.

Patrick Lane was one of hundreds of writers Howard White published at Harbour Publishing he said in his opening remarks. Howie knew “more of the guy he hung out with” than the poet who he first met in 1974 or thereabouts.  He remembers going to the Cecil Hotel bar in Vancouver (demolished in 2011) after one of Patrick’s readings.

Pat, as he was known in those days, moved to Pender Harbour with his partner Carol. Howie and Patrick shot pool, drank together and “got be good friends.” Pat was an easy going guy, Howie said, and an enthusiastic storyteller.

Patrick apparently made some money as a handyman, “slamming together some rough back steps.” After a few years he was building houses.  He “packed in the cozy scene in Pender and went on the road again,” Howie said. “Poetry was Patrick’s battleground.”

When I attended poetry retreats with Patrick, I don’t remember him saying: “If you’re going to write, there can’t be a safety net.”  That’s what Howie remembers Patrick saying and I appreciate hearing it now. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make money in ways other than publishing his poetry but when he heard that someone he knew was going to get a law degree to support their writing financially, he said, “That’s bullshit.”

Steven Price was nineteen when he met Patrick Lane at the University of Victoria. At that time, Steven thought poetry had to rhyme. He said of Patrick: “He terrified me and electrified me.”

Patrick became a mentor and a friend to Steven who said Patrick Lane was one of the finest human begins he’s ever known.  Steven read “Slick”  which contains the line: “How hard it is to remember I forget, to forget I remember.”  Patrick describes a knife blade as “a sigh, a trout caught in the mountains,/ the flight of willow leaves.”

He was a master of metaphor and a master teacher.  So often with we poets at retreats, Patrick would suggest taking out the first few lines of a poem we had written. Or a whole stanza. If we happened to sit with him in the late afternoon, he’d have the typed version in front of him and would draw a pen through the first lines, draw arrows where other lines ought to go and take out most “ofs” and “ands.” At times he had us counting syllables and he always had us listening to the cadence and rhythm of a poem. Our ordinary speech is full of poetry Patrick said. No one talks in sentences.

Esi Edugyan said Patrick was her first teacher when she was seventeen at the University of Victoria. She remembered that in her second year her mother had suddenly passed away and Patrick gave her a bear hug. Esi read “Icebergs off Fogo Island.”

It is the quiet we love, the way water touches us,
the iceberg an animal gone astray in search of time.

The poet reminds us: “The water that is ice is ten thousand years old.”

One of Patrick’s sons, Michael Lane who was born in Vernon, B.C. and lived in Pender Harbour as a young child, chose “Om” to read as he felt it was his father in his final days.

I feel my brittle bones and smile. I am as fragile as winter grass.
I think of leaping to the floor and don’t.
Like my old cat I climb down slowly, accept
the smile of my woman who gives me coffee in the morning.

From “Om” by Patrick Lane

It’s such a gorgeous poem with a mole’s cry, memories of “when we moved / naked in a summer far away” and the Buddhist writing that was a literary influence: “and so the prince set out on the road to discover suffering / and gave his self up at the last.”

Esi Edugyan and Steven Price are both writers and partners and Steven commented on the example of Patrick and Lorna who “believed in each other.”

Patrick’s son, Richard Lane, said his relationship with his dad “didn’t stretch too deeply into poetry.” They spoke about trucks, football and hammers. Patrick’s choice was hammering by hand not with a pneumatic hammer. They talked of hummingbirds a lot so Richard read “Hummingbirds,” the second poem in The Quiet in Me.

Richard also read an except from “Wild Birds” written in the seventies and included in The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011).

Because the light has paled and the moon
has wandered west and left the night
to the receding sea, we turn into ourselves
and count our solitudes. The change
we might have wished for had we time

To wish is gone. . . .

From “Wild Birds” by Patrick Lane

Later at the Zoom launch, Richard said he could hear his father’s voice in his poetry.

Lorna Crozier said he loved “all of you who are reading tonight.” For the people reading, Patrick was their first teacher. In a way, she said, she had to “channel” Patrick to make a change, delete a poem, add a poem” for The Quiet in Me.

In an article in the Toronto Star (Sat. April 9, 2020, “Celebrating a life of poetry together”),  the Books Editor, Deborah Dundas, recounts a conversation she had with Lorna via telephone. Although he had been ill for three years, an illness that went undiagnosed, Lorna said, in the article” “Neither of us knew he was dying.”

In the introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna writes: “His calling to poetry began when he was a young man working in the mill towns of British Columbia, and it never left him. About a month before he died, he gave me a folder of poems he’d been working on in the rare moments of grace he found in the  midst of an enervating illness. ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘I think I have a small book here.’ I thought so, too, and as we always did for one another, I made a few editing notes on the pages. He never felt well enough to return to these poems and though most of my comments consisted of one word, ‘Wonderful,” it fell to me after his death to pull the manuscript together and make the final cuts and edits.”

“My heart is close to breaking,” Lorna said following the reading of Patrick’s poems at the Zoom launch . She read “Kinttsugi”  meaning “golden repair” which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mixing lacquer with powdered gold.  Lorna said Patrick’s “golden repair was poetry.” And she read “Carefully.”

Carefully

The mole in his small room
moves a small stone
and waits out the rain.

Patrick Lane, The Quiet in Me

Howie read the title poem of the book: “The Quiet in Me.” In the poem, the speaker lifts a man who has fallen to the pavement from his wheelchair and recalls a friend, from “long ago,” a prospector he had lifted to his bed “and dead, / and dead.”

. . . . .  . . . . . . the lovers too I laid to rest
in the sleep that follows love, all the arms I’ve held, such arms as will hold me.

from “The Quiet in Me” by Patrick Lane

Lorna wrote in the introduction to The Quiet in Me: “A poet who sang the darkness, he also found music for the enlightened moment in the garden, the turtle in the mud, the cat presenting to his master the body of a mole. In wonder and wisdom, he found the notes and language of love and the deep quiet that he came to in himself.”

As Lorna said at the Zoom launch, the god of Patrick’s understanding was an old tree. The Quiet in Me is dedicated to his children and grandchildren, his beloved students and his life-long friend and poetry publisher Howie White. I’m very grateful to have been one of those students.

Select poems excerpted from The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane (Lorna Crozier, ed.) 2022, with permission from Harbour Publishing.

Things Will Come to You 

The song your grandmother taught you,
the beautiful, the beautiful river
gather with the saints at the river, smooth stones

instruments of silence. Hold one to your temple.
Remember. Hear your true name. Moon, sea,
stone: always listen from the quiet part of you.

Mary Ann Moore