John Lane’s creative center has always been poetry though he has become more widely know in the past decade for his environmental narratives such as Waist Deep in Black Water, Chattooga, and Circling Home. In 1995, with the publication by New Native Press of Against Information & Other Poems, Lane’s poems were hailed on the front page of Small Press Review as “a fearless celebration of the materials of words...a sign of hope...” “Against Information,” the title poem of that collection, has been mistaken for an advertisement, widely praised both nationally and internationally in
reviews, scripted into an independent video, and featured on Canadian Public Radio’s popular news program As it Happens.
Now, Abandoned Quarry publishes for the first time in a trade edition Lane’s poems from Quarries, As the World Around us Sleeps, Against Information & Other Poems, The Dead Father Poems, Noble Trees, and other chapbooks, broadsides, and little magazines. Mostly out of print, or simply unavailable except in rare book collections, the selection of poems in Abandoned Quarry shows the growth and fullness of spirit of one of the important Southern poets to emerge in the 1980s.
The poems range in subject matter through relationships, family, nature, improvisational pieces, and even rants about the strangeness of the modern condition. Abandoned Quarry includes much of lane’s published poetry over thirty years plus a selection of new poems.