Ash Steps

M. Travis Lane's fourteenth poetry title is a meditation on loss and reorientation, continuity and memory. Widowhood and mortality are at the centre of this quiet collection, but fear and self-pity are not to be found here: only a clear-eyed coming-to-terms. Lane's metaphors are unforced, natural yet always surprising: a beggar sitting at the midpoint of a footbridge "like the small bubble balancing/ midway in a plumber's level," trees in a night plaza that "hold/ like dark peaches the late street lamps." Her acute powers of observation are entwined with historical and cultural awareness, attunement to the natural world, and a music that holds it all together.