Lane's poems tell us about things we would like to forget. They are the acerbic documents of an imagination turned inside out. Lane records his impressions of reality with guts. There is no jive circumlocution in his style—an unschooled, street-cool one that serves the purpose of his perception. Neither does he run at the mouth for the sake of vocabulary….

Beware the Months of Fire is Lane's ninth collection, and it contains many poems from earlier, now out-of-print editions. The new poems complement the range of Lane's voice. They also touch upon familiar and poignant subjects; from the almost scatological view of "What Does Not Change" to the brutality of "Gerald"; from big city streets to country jails to the haunting isolation of the B.C. interior, and from the malaise called South America to Canada's own spectral Indian Reservations. Lane has covered them all. His poems...