Lane's poems are more visceral than cerebral and are not abstract at all. At their most representative they focus on a specific person or place in his life, such as a whore or a lumberjack, a jail cell or a highway, and they are characterized by a general surefootedness and realism through which he sprinkles the occasional brilliant image, the odd burst of poetry so pure it makes you squirm. This places him in direct contrast with those who favour the halting and the indirect, who esteem the distillation of experience to the point where the poem is the residue of the moment and the thought. Likewise it removes him from those of the other popular extreme for whom the poem is a topical thing dashed off to preserve the moment of its birth; who do not eliminate, rework and reshape but who believe in the blanket method...