Books
If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb
Lorraine Gane’s If I Have Known Beauty is a brightly-spangled example of the essential conversations poets have with one another through their poetry. It is also a deeply moving tribute to her friend, the poet Phyllis Webb. What will fill the absence, Gane asks, knowing the only true possibility: the space you were / grows larger. These poems glide into that widening space like a long drawn out note of sweet music.
—Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
36 Pages, Raven Chapbooks, limited edition of 125 books
Arc of Light
In this loving and light-filled elegy to her mother, Salt Spring Island poet Lorraine Gane evokes a painful stage that mid-life children of ailing parents will recognize. It is a complex grief, letting go of parents as protectors, moving into acceptance of inevitable loss, and of their own place, parentless, now on the front lines of mortality… The beauty of the natural world is ever present in these poems; doubtless Salt Spring’s stunning landscapes assist Gane’s braiding of light and dark, life and death… The final poem finds her tranquil and accepting, comforted by the image of a luminous white arc floating over her mother’s body, “all softness and light.”— Wendy Donawa, author of Thin Air Of The Knowable, The Gorge: A Cartography of Sorrows, Those Astonishments Of Sorrow, Of Joy
47 pages, Raven Chapbooks, 2020, limited edition of 100 books
$20 (plus $7 postage/handling in Canada)
For more information and to order click here.
Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on My Skin
In the early ‘90s Lorraine Gane’s fiancé was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, dying nine months later during a bone marrow operation in New York City.
This first collection of poems chronicles her journey through doctor’s offices and hospitals, but also reveals through dreams and monologue a deeper response to the death and its aftermath.
Her intense, sometimes stark, but consistently lyrical voice moves the text through an intimate story of love, loss and renewal.
65 pages, Black Moss Press, 2002, $17.95
The Blue Halo
Wars, aging, illness, death, and natural disasters are juxtaposed with luminous encounters in nature and with loved ones to awaken a deeper perception—what ancient sages have known for thousands of years and quantum physicists have discovered in the last forty: We live in a vast universe of interrelatedness where the possibilities to meet and be met by beauty are open to us in every moment.
80 pages, Leaf Press, 2014, $17
The Way the Light Enters
These poems explore the place where the ordinary meets the extraordinary in the forests, hidden vales, mountains, and secret coves of the West Coast’s Gulf Islands. At the heart of the collection is a meditation on the threshold of the self as the old shell cracks to reveal the luminous nature of all existence: the gold-dusted tongues of trilliums on the forest floor, stars quivering in their silky pods, the shining face of a beloved on a winter afternoon, cedar boughs parting to let through the sun’s long resplendent fingers of light.
64 pages, Black Moss Press, 2014, $10 SOLD OUT
