This volume represents the accumulated richness of fifty years’ work by one of Canada’s most important poets, Patrick Lane. Here, the reader can see how he developed from an engaged recorder of hard experience-even traumatic violence-into a master poet whose meditations on nature, human frailty, and love allow him to balance the world’s suffering with stunning moments of transcendent beauty and a vision of peace. He expresses himself in a variety of forms and tones–in turn despairing and rejoicing, tender and brutal, imagistic and elegiac, deeply personal and universal. As Nicholas Bradley observes, in an afterword written for this volume, The journey that Lane’s works trace has been long and hard, but, as this collection demonstrates, his poems achieve both understanding and grace.

Edited by two distinguished scholars of Canadian literature, this long-overdue book gathers a lifetime of work. Ranging from Letters from a Savage Mind (1966) to Witness (2010), this collection contains more than four hundred poems (many revised for this publication) and demonstrates the breadth of Lane’s achievement.