The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of "home" in both historical and present contexts and reflect on the identity of the woman poet and what it means to be a writer. Lane's poems exhibit impressive range and variety-long poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual art-and are richly attentive to the landscapes, both urban and wild, of her New Brunswick home. They voice a sense of urgency with respect to ecological crises and war; her poetic attention fixes unwaveringly on the smallest pebble on the coast of Fundy but is equally attuned to global patterns of destructive domination.

In her introduction "As Opportunity for Grace, This Life May Serve", editor Jeanette Lynes discusses how Lane's poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artist's task of mapping her world. Lane's afterword reinforces her sense of the poet's project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the "unified disunities" of all things.

M. Travis Lane is Honorary President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick and a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has published eleven books of poetry (including the forthcoming The Safety Net) and received numerous awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Prize, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts.

Table of Contents for
The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes

Foreword | Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction | Jeanette Lynes

The Talisman

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Compost

The Song of Lot's Wife

A Stone from Fundy

Well, Viewed by the God

Colonial

Red Earth [excerpt from "Divinations," Book Two]

Walking Under the Nebulae

The Weight of the Real

The House as Sculpture as Chapel as Priest

Six Poems on a Sculpture by Ülker Özerdem

For the Cenotaph, November 11, 1983

Departures

Whine

King's Landing

The Gift from the Bad Fairy

Skindeep

The Horn That Is So Difficult to Play

You Want Your Truths Told of You

Hills

Local Suite

About the Size of It

Half Past

Triptych/Tock

There Are Real Ants in the Metro

Strive for a Deep Stillness

Dusk Sequence

Codicil

"Cracked"

Keeping Afloat

The Soloist

Tourists

Overboard

For You

Afterword: Those Mysteries of Which We Cannot Plainly Speak | M. Travis Lane

Acknowledgements