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Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems

By author: John Lane
Product Code: P428
ISBN: 9780881462418
Product Format: Paperback
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Availability: In stock
Price: $20.00

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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.
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Reviews

Review by: David Lee, Former poet laureate of Utah and author of So Quietly the Earth - August 1, 2011
A quarter of the way into Abandoned Quarry I thought, “John Lane is the finest Southern landscape poet we have today.” Half way through the manuscript I said out loud to a cardinal in the live oak outside my window, “No poet from the South ever used his world and the influence of that world as well as Johnny Lane. I thought you’d want to know that.” But then late at night after the birds had left and gone home, I finished the collection and for the rest of the darkness my lightning forked no words. I could only feel the effect of the poems permeating my entire being. Today the cardinal is back in the live oak and I’m realizing that I cannot imagine ever again breathing the thought of Southern poetry and not immediately thinking, “Oh. Yeah: John Lane.” He’s just flat that good.
Review by: Ron Rash, Author of Raising the Dead and Eureka Mill - August 1, 2011
Abandoned Quarry takes the reader into the heart of nature as well as into the nature of the heart, and John Lane writes of both with wonder, wisdom, and profound attentiveness. What a magnificent book; what a magnificent poet.
Review by: Kate Daniels, Author of A Walk in Victoria's Secret - August 1, 2011
John Lane has been writing poems that insist we pay close attention to the natural world that gives over more each day to the ravages of humankind. Without rancor, he shows us how to make stories and music out of what remains, and how to thrive in the small epiphanies still to be found chopping wood, climbing rocks, or drinking sweet tea on a shaded front porch.
Review by: Greg Orr, Author of Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved - August 1, 2011
From a long-held ethos of thoughtful, observant engagement with landscape and humanscape, John Lane has created poems that lament what's lost, praise what is, and prophesy what could be. Reading them, we hear a clear voice that does what the best poetry always does-persuades and sustains.

Goodreads reviews