Southern Range

"Southern Range' gathers John Lane's long poems into a volume spanning over four decades. Since the early 80s Lane's imagination has often taken the form of long poems, or sequences of poems. By choosing to write to longer impulses Lane has explored formal traditions practiced by many of the poets he most admires. Sometimes meditative, often layered, associative, and playful, 'Southern Range' borrows images and explores memories from landscapes Lane knows well, mostly the upper Piedmont of South Carolina. There are rivers, hills, gullies, and hardwood groves. There is also the period irony of Against Information and the tour du force of Kingdom & Glory, a narrative reimagining Spartanburg County's 1903 flood from the perspective of a preacher riding downstream in his own church. "Lane's imagination is never far from the...the ancient processes of the natural world," says William Carlos Williams scholar Mark Long in his preface to the volume. "You will sense below the ridgelines, lurking in the draws and hollows, the tributaries of family and place-the shady streambeds, the eddies in the passing of time, the swirling waters where these poems were made."--