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Southern Range: Collected Longer Poems 1980-2022

Southern Range: Collected Longer Poems 1980-2022
By author: John Lane
Product Code: P711
ISBN: 9780881460421
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SOUTHERN RANGE gathers John Lane's long poems into a volume spanning over four decades. Since the early 1980s Lane's imagination has often taken the form of long poems, or sequences of poems. By choosing to write to longer impulses Lane has explored formal traditions practiced by many of the poets he most admires. Sometimes meditative, often layered, associative, and playful, this collection borrows images and explores memories from landscapes Lane knows well, mostly the upper Piedmont of South Carolina. There are rivers, hills, gullies, and hardwood groves. There is also the period irony of "Against Information" and the tour de force of "Kingdom & Glory," a narrative reimagining Spartanburg County's 1903 flood from the perspective of a preacher riding downstream in his own church. "Lane's imagination is never far from...the ancient processes of the natural world," says William Carlos Williams scholar Mark Long in his preface to the volume. "You will sense below the ridgelines, lurking in the draws and hollows, the tributaries of family and place--the shady streambeds, the eddies in the passing of time, the swirling waters where these poems were made."
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Reviews

Review by: Mike James, author of PORTABLE LIGHT - December 20, 2024
"Ambition in contemporary poetry is often in short supply. John Lane does not suffer from a lack of ambition or a lack of skill in these extraordinary long poems. In the same way ABANDONED QUARRY shows his mastery of the short form, these poems show a poet pushing his skills while challenging his readers with a joyride of stunning imagery, amazing leaps, and sonic pleasures."
Review by: David Lee, author of DRIVING & DRINKING - December 20, 2024
"John Lane is one of the brightest and most versatile poets we have among us and those qualities are on ample display in this book, his venture into the world of the American Long Poem. The craft in these pieces is often brilliant, the imagery is superb, the logical structure is tight and coherent, the poems flow like mountain water. But the quality I admire most in this collection is the overwhelming sense of joy that permeates these poems. Lane's world is a world worth living in, a world where we find beauty and rapture. It is a welcome over the shoulder look back at a world we once had, a reminder of what we might find, and who we could be if we lived attentively and deliberately. I envy anyone unfamiliar with John Lane's poetry who opens this book for the first time: a grand notion awaits."
Review by: Sharon Doubiago, author of HARD COUNTRY - December 20, 2024
"'What does poetry know?' John Lane asks. In his magnificent SOUTHERN RANGE the poet is always asking, always digging, comes close to knowing. 'There's a pulse of language, / but no words. It's all narrative.' With some of my own roots in Spartanburg, South Carolina, perhaps the long poem is a natural."

Goodreads reviews