Beware the Months of Fire is a book which is sometimes brutal, often morbid, usually disturbing. Like Yeats, Lane finds his muse "In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart", but what a foul shop this is, leading to darkness rather than Byzantium. These poems explore an intensely black vision, remindful both in grotesque point of view and morbid tone of Sylvia Plath's work. Just as Plath once confided that she enjoyed watching "cadavers cut open", Lane's poetry reveals a similar grisly fascination with bodies, both dead and dying…. Although death is treated graphically by Lane, rather than as an abstraction, there is an underlying sense of purpose in his poetry, summarized by the epigraph: "The greatest defeat, in anything, is to forget, and above all to forget what it is that has smashed you, and to let yourself be smashed without ever realizing how thoroughly devilish men...