I have always had the utmost respect for Lane's work in books and magazines, and this new volume [Poems New & Selected] is an ostensible culmination of his poetic talent. His themes are earthy, steeped in raw experience, the sweat of working and loving, and his language rages with pain, a violent beauty, and Neruda's "confused impurity of the human condition." His imagery is seldom bland; in fact, it often relies on a shock effect….

Lane's poems are poignantly impressionistic observations on the menacing aspects of man and nature. He writes about his native British Columbia with passion and irony, like a man who knows its moods inside out. He can soar into the lyricism of "Macchu Picchu," or dive into himself with "The Trace of Being." The feeling is always there, taut with emotion, every word a muscle expressing the imagination of a true poet whose sensibilities thrum...