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1. Grand mirrors and little graves

A poet is always ready to see large and small .... If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.
         - Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

For Earths, grow thick as Berries, in my native town -

My Basket holds - just - Firmaments - Those - dangle easy - on my arm
         - Emily Dickinson, poem #352

The magnitude of our thoughts and feelings aren't fixed by what lies outside our windows. Marianne glances out at a seascape she's known all her life and takes its vastness for granted; Meredith gazes out at a brick wall and, rebelling against its blankness, drifts into a vigorous fantasy life. Yet the phrase "room with a view" attracts us for good reasons, since we suspect that certain kinds of views give us fulfillment and health. M. Travis Lane begins one of her early poems, "Requisition" (P): "A house that has, out its windows, / neither mountain nor sea / is hardly a house." After that hyperbole, she considers a small city (one thinks of her Fredericton) that lacks both mountain and sea, and needs to be "uneased / by something more than fuss: / pre-eminent, / stolid - an indifferent shock." While that shock has something to do with scale beyond the city's "flat river" and "cola signs," the poem also puts aside "white Orion" as not meeting the need for greater dimensions. Instead,

something nearer at hand than stars -
is required -
and further.
Something a little too large -
and not yet quite out of mind.

The dashes and the cagey moments - "something," "a little too," "not yet quite" - are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, who will often be glimpsed through the shrubbery, as it were, during this exploration of Lane's poetry. What a house needs, "Requisition" claims, is something non-human in grandeur yet accessible (if in the end even more unknowable than Orion - what I think "and further" suggests). Small things may be associated with "fuss," but Lane's poem qualifies admiration for the pre-eminent with the word "stolid," which hints at a downside to some manifestations of the sublime (The Canadian Oxford Dictionary says of "stolid": "unlikely to feel or express emotion ... dull, uninspired").

Citing "Requisition" to kick off an essay on Travis Lane's fascination with matters of the small and the large may seem perverse. In her nine books of poems she celebrates the miniature more often than the massive. Typically, "The Grand Mirrors of Versailles" (D) pits the brutalities of the large - "the great bronze tank, Bonaparte's / state carriage tonned by blinded angels" - against "the little graves of soldiers, cooks, yard-boys / who bruised in the long, grey fields / for the eyes in the grand, blue mirrors." While Lane concentrates on the grandness of Versailles, the heart of the poem is found in the passages about the soldiers' "little graves" and birds singing their oxymoronic "petite eternity" (Dickinson has "fame petite" and "Czar petite" - # 159, 166). What's most honoured is diminutive; in this case, the number of allotted lines - the size of the passage dedicated to X or Y - is in reverse relation to the amount of sympathy given. A shorter poem of Lane's uneasy with largeness, "About the Size of It" (NP), contrasts two kinds of engagement with Nature: running in, flailing about, claiming possession, and a cautious, less invasive approach: "claim // only a single errand run; / report: one nut" (NP). Size is a factor here, the first figure standing tall with his "vividness of shoulder, strong arms" while the second figure creeps "mousely." Proposing a relationship between size and possession, Bachelard has written, "The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it"; but surely Lane would baulk at "possess," as she would at Bachelard's comment, "I feel more at home in miniature worlds, which, for me, are dominated worlds." The preferred figure in "About the Size of It" reports one nut; he doesn't stake any claim over it.

"About the Size of It" is brilliantly cogent and expressive, yet the dichotomy it sets up only takes us so far. "Requisition" was an earlier clue that Lane's poetics of the large and the small aren't cut-and-dried. I certainly don't see her poetry desiring Titanic forces that swamp or stun the perceiver, yet I also don't see them content with single errands or reports of "one nut." They're far too inquisitive, wide-ranging, and ambitious for that. Lane's first collection was a chapbook called In Inch or So of Garden, but we quickly find the modesty in the title contrasting with the range of mind and language in the book. While Lane may have poems entitled "Like a Snail," "Tadpole," and "Fly's Wing," she has also written "Moving the Universe," "The Weight of the Real," and "The World is Very Large." 2. In praise of small things

Shreds, shards - and yet, significance.
"Dig!" says Thoreau. My elbows ache.
There is no other garden here.
        - Lane, "Skindeep" (ST)

To contemplate the miniature, to create in miniature, and (more questionably) even to be a miniature, can bring a degree of satisfaction that is not easily explained.
        - Frances Armstrong         

Over thirty years ago, as an undergraduate I often walked through Travis Lane's neighborhood in Fredericton on the way to and from classes and hours in the university library, including hours poring over poetry as I never had before. Though I was already reading Lane's books, admiring their music and rhythms from the start, I was too young to appreciate with much depth just how much she was imaginatively enlarging the small city I knew as home. Now I feel fortunate to read her poetry and find her curiosity, her lyricism, and her witty, unique mind lighting up what she sees. Her poetry ranges far and wide through history, geography, and culture, yet I'm especially moved to think of her eyes catching moments in that familiar neighborhood and bestowing upon them the enlarging energy and intelligence of her language.

In "Structuring Miscellany," her prose preface to Temporary Shelter, Lane writes, "My subject is always the emotional experience of thought," but I also find in her poems what might be called the intellectual experience of feeling. Like Dickinson, she dramatizes the inextricableness of thought and feeling to the point where they're hard to tell apart. "Structuring Miscellany" is also a place where Lane explicitly espouses a poetics of the small. Wishing not to "forsake the fact of poetry for the wish of theory," she says "my poems do not build upon each other like coral polyps in a reef" and maintains that her book is a "miscellany of discrete amusements." She underplays the fact that one excitement possible in traveling through the wide range of her work - or even a single collection - is discovering how her poems overlap or argue with, connect to or diverge from, each other. Those authorial comments in "Structuring Miscellany" may not do justice to the larger patterns and developmental varieties throughout Lane's books - though eventually the preface itself does describe considerable varieties among the poems. (Elsewhere Lane has commented, "My poetry speaks better for me than my prose.")

One key passage in the Temporary Shelter preface is where Lane says that its sequence "Local Suite" concentrates on "the subtleties of minor emotions" and "might be read as questioning our tendency to suppose smallness less serious than largeness." This idea had been embodied in Lane's poetry from the start, and was acknowledged in her 1974 review of fellow Frederictonian A. G. Bailey's Thanks for a Drowned Island, which concluded with a discussion of his poem "The Muskat and the Whale." Bailey and, by extension, Lane, praise the muskat for his playfulness, practical skills, and lack of pretension:

Dignity and industry lend size to the muskrat.
His size is his own, and mete.
The whale may think his dignity is greater.
The muskrat would be able, if the thought
         struck him,
to prove his own title to the quality,
         sooner or later.

A smaller word than appropriate, fitting, or accurate, "mete" with its one syllable and four letters seems just right, mete. An Inch or So of Garden starts, in a prayer poem called "Advertizement," with someone humorously contrasting herself with the sort of figure God might want to do His work. She calls herself "a bad ad" and says, "As a street sign - I'm hard to read. / As a light? I don't shine in valleys. / I don't shine at night." While the poem includes self-mockery, it also casts an amused eye upon demonstrative candidates for spiritual service. "Try another, Lord," she prays, then she speaks of those who "stick up posters on anything - / old barns, old women," and concludes with the image of a woman with "a great big sign across her middle: / 'Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?'" Various forms of largeness - the sign, the Capitalized Letters, perhaps the woman - are quietly mocked. At the other end of the chapbook, "The Talisman" is a brief, concluding poem focussed on a pocketed "unimportant stone." That stone, "neither smooth to touch, nor lovely," is "useless" in a good way: its uselessness makes it "a stone I can understand," "quite my own," a talisman. Meaning and art are dangerous, the poem goes on to say: "but once I give it meaning, / art will give the meaningless a heart, / and heart is nothing safe in hand, / and nothing I can understand." What can be pocketed, then - what is small - is comforting, "safe."

Before taking "The Talisman" as a talisman of Lane's poetry, we should pick up on the irony that despite its reluctance to seek "meaning" and "art" it embodies both, and it comes at the end of a book full of poetic scope and craft; and we should note that the chapbook also has three poems including the largest of mammals, whales. (Whales return in Lane's collection Poems 1968-1972 and Temporary Shelter; it may be no coincidence that her husband, Lauriat Lane Jr., taught courses and published criticism on the greatest cetologist among novelists, Melville.) "The Apollonian Whale" (IS) describes with some awe the "white gustiness" of a "giant grubbing black." If Lane had concluded her chapbook with that poem rather than "The Talisman," the relationship between book title and final poem would've been one of contrast rather than mirroring. Her placement of "The Talisman"at the end of both An Inch... and of the six poems chosen from that chapbook for Solid Things: Poems New and Selected is just one example of how her editorial and structural strategies - not just the poems themselves - foreground concentration on the small more than on the large. Yet "The Apollonian Whale" is one of the other five poems from the chapbook she chose for Solid Things.

3. The strength of the small

And then - the size of this "small" life -
The Sages - call it small -
Swelled - like Horizons - in my vest -
And I sneered - softly - "small"!
        - Dickinson, #271

So if it is small, it is a great smallness,
a creaturely smallness,
a smallness made to snuggle
into a nest it makes for itself.
        - Ross Leckie, "All Things Great and Small"

Travis Lane's poems sometimes underline our pipsqueak significance in the face of all other existence. In the mountain-climbing of "Peak" (ST), on a glacial height human travelers "hack our tiny steps in ice," and "My mind / frays like a coney's straw. / Olympus gnaws." If the classical peak is miniaturized as a gnawer, the mind is less than that, mere fodder. The title of another Lane poem, "From the Wings" (NP), suggests a peripheral site for both poet and poetry. Though it may offer one of Lane's metaphors of diminishment, comparing the moon to an "exaggerated theatre whose one round eye / starts blankly as a button," the poem emphasizes above all the minor role of the poet herself. The night sky, "an overture / to some profounder opera than my own,"

reminds me that I am not here,
midcentre in your interests.
Out front an epic happens, not on me
in my meek overcoat and boots,
receiving what the weather brings....

Likewise, in the poem "In the Garden of Mildewed Roses" (TS) a poet "drenched" in "petty vanities" thinks of herself as "a bird in an aviary / with a small voice"and of her poems as "small as a cat's marks on the rug." Smallness in this poem is disillusioned and self-deprecating, though the poem's ending begins to move into hope: "These fogs will lift, // the seawinds show / beyond the bay the mountains of the heart!" The massive - mountains - are set in positive contrast to the poet's "little scrawls." We shouldn't conclude that for Lane the poem is always as inconsequential as a cat's marks; "In the Garden ...," after all, is a monologue from the midst of despondency, a particular case not to be mistaken for a universal demonstration. And three pages later in Temporary Shelter we find Lane in a very different mood offering "The Poem Insists," a semi-comic piece that has the poem feistily depicting itself as stubborn and insistent: "The wet dog brings me in. / You throw her out. / I go on clinging to her fur, / but I'll be back." The contrast between "In the Garden..." and "The Poem Insists" is more intriguingly layered than either poem in itself, a reminder that blinkered emphasis on one poem can narrow the width of a poet's work.

Despite occasional emphasis on the mouse-squeaks of human endeavour, Lane's figures of smallness can show surprising strength. Once again, watch for glimpses of Dickinson not far off. Dickinson likens herself to a "little Angle Worm" (#885),"a tiny Courtier / In thine Ermine" (#151), "a Mouse / O'erpowered by the Cat" (#61), and a "Drop, that wrestles in the Sea" (#284), but in more Wordsworthian moments she writes, "The Brain - is wider than the sky"(#632) and "when all Space has been beheld / And all Dominion shown / The smallest Human Heart's extent / Reduces it to none" (#1162). The contrasts in Lane's poetry between diminution of self and enlargement of self are less drastic than in Dickinson's poetry; this may have as much to do with differences between late 20th century poets and earlier ones as between the two poets otherwise, since poets from Stevens going back to Wordsworth, even those of a skeptical mind, were more likely to tap into Romantic confidence at times. Yet the contrasts are still there in Lane, and sometimes she claims surprising strength for the "small" self, smallness and strength not always seen as opposites.

In "Six Poems Looking at Sculpture by Ülker Özerdem" (R), Lane speaks of "our tiny world," yet with the Özerdem sculpture in mind that tininess isn't fragile: "Its basic shape / is arch, clasped hands, a pelvis: / full of strength." "Moving the Universe," the poem Lane chose to highlight by placing on the final page of Divinations, and dedicated to South African writer Wole Soyinka, ends: "A crowbone scratches on the gate: / Lever: only a just man's thumb, / This place / to stand on!" (D). In that poem, a powerful miniature is one citizen's courage to stand up to political injustice (Thoreau wrote that a government "has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will" ). In an earlier poem from Divinations, "Tadpole," someone standing by a pond peers into the dark water and sees how

... whatever it is ducks out, will hide
in the mud swirl, essence, the tiny I AM -
someone Else alive in this lake,
making its own commotion -
to be that quick, serve what I do
so sideways, hidden, a jetty gleam - ....

The eye here doesn't see the tadpole as trivial, instead sensing in it the powers of being, the creature's modest size contrasting with the capitalization of "tiny I AM" and "someone Else," and with everything vital suggested by the words "ducks out," "alive," "its own commotion," "that quick." The pulse of being - the energy of a living thing's "essence" - should perhaps be considered large before it's considered trivial. Turn to Dickinson's poem #154: a flower, described as "superfluous" and "provincial" except to Heaven, Butterflies, and a Bee, may be the "smallest Housewife in the grass, / Yet take her from the Lawn / And somebody has lost the face / That made Existence - Home!" (#154). Lane's "I AM" is not far from Dickinson's "Existence."

At the end of a later poem, "The Stars Perspire" (NP), a small unnamed bird takes on more significance than the "perspiring" stars that "go in and out of living like small bugs":

Against this wilderness, this plain
forgetfulness, a bird

from the dim rafters of its tree
poses its miniature machine,

its sweat,
its tiny voice.

The adjectives "miniature" and "tiny" point to the bird's limited size, but the poem's cadences and spacings - Lane's letting the bird's physical nature (specifically its "sweat") and its forgetfulness-opposing voice have lines all of their own - suggest oppositional energy and an expressiveness in a small creature singing under the vast but distant stars. In another poem from Night Physics, "Music for a While," a bird's voice is again contrasted with a star and given precedence. Unlike the star, "which has no music," there is "something like a phoebe's note, / harsher, perhaps, in the August heat." (Dickinson: "I am a Phoebe - nothing more - / A Phoebe - nothing less"-- #467). From a divine perspective, musical geniuses and giants are then diminished - "the gods, for whom Bach, Handel, are but gnats" - yet that diminishment is quickly undercut: "the gods / may not exist." When the poem ends "we must invent // a small bird calls in the great dark / say 'darkness is / God's listening,'" a small, solitary voice again appears as a sign of pushing back against whatever threatens to overwhelm and exhaust us.

4. Acts of Miniaturizing

… liberation from all obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a special characteristic of the activity of the imagination.
         - Bachelard

Among the commonest kinds of reversals in Lane's poetry are ones familiar to anyone attentive to metaphor: transformations of something small into something large (think of Neruda's much-loved odes to tomato, artichoke, chestnut), or vice versa. Lane's poetry is a place where a yellow pond lily can be a miniature sun, "All the world rolled in its lap, / like a small baby / sleeping" (IS); and where a match girl, shivering, "held us in her small, blue hands, / a universe" (R). Such images often work two ways: the match girl becomes a towering figure while the universe of "us" becomes small enough to fit into cupped hands. Any "doctrine of the imaginary," says Bachelard, " is necessarily a philosophy of excess, and all images are destined to be enlarged." The half-truth of Bachelard's statement is that other images, we could say, are destined to be concentrated in a grain of sand. Putting eternity in a grain of sand not only enlarges the grain of sand but also makes eternity petite.

In Lane's poetry, instances of making the large small greatly outnumber cases of making the small large. While Bachelard says, "One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small," one must do the same to experience what is small in what is large - or smaller in what is already small. Past cultures teem with examples of this kind of dimension-revisioning, from the fairy tales of Thumbelina and Tom Thumb to Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag (the flip side appearing in Lilliput), from Dickinson's likening Heaven to a tent (#243) and imagining God as a boy climbing a fence to get strawberries (# 251) to the Hollywood movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

One subcategory of making the large small could be called astronomical-planetary miniaturizing: Mars as "one red eye" ("Burning the Greens," TS), the moon as "a piece of lit straw" ("Moving the Universe,"D), Earth as "a little ball, / this marble aggie for the thumb" ("The Clouds," TS), and, most variously, stars as " match-ends tossed in a bird-bath" ("To Get from Monday to Wednesday," P), "dandruff on our heads" ("Sisters," R), or "mustard seeds" ("Winter," R). One of the most beautiful Venus poems anywhere, Lane's "Venus Our Very Favourite Star"(ST), puts forth a cluster of miniaturizing metaphors, including "tea-tray for lovers, bat / for poets, disc, bead, diamond" and, more expansively, "the promised drop / of Hippocrene, sniff of eternal perfume on the rim / of what we feel might be our time." Midway through the poem, after a trio of further metaphors for the planet of love - "the unlanding ship, the outpost of the alien, / the stranger who might speak some day / (but never does)" - Lane reverses the process of miniaturizing:

or are you an ammoniac sea, a sort of wild, impersonal
blue hell or heaven on such a scale
we only think it chemical,

or you are "home"
for what speaks neither in our tongues
not in our metamorphoses, a life our cells can not suppose,

nouns we can't name, unspeakable
star verbs ....

At this stage of the poem, Lane turns away from metaphors of domestic items (tea-tray, bead) and larger objects (ship, outpost) to the actual "scale" of Venus, its wildness and impersonality, its imperviousness to metaphor. The stark truth of Venus speaking no human language, having little to do with "our cells," is laid bare. Yet the vastness is complicated by the poet's addressing Venus - not just talking about it - and by a mixture of the domestic and the galactic: "and you are dust - like mattress fluff, / a mild domestic messiness / that any galaxy heaps up." "Venus Our Very Favourite Star" is one of Lane's poems that most vividly dramatizes a mind in action miniaturizing what is enormous and little-known, almost beyond comprehension, while also acknowledging the limits of miniaturizing.

In our daily lives, many of us engage in the ancient habit of bestowing miniaturizing terms affectionately upon family members, lovers, or pets. (Curiously, in English "belittle" is only a pejorative verb.) We call our children Pumpkin, Little Bean, Sweat Pea, Cupcake. B. B. King sings "Sweet Little Angel," Chuck Berry "Little Queenie," Aaron Neville "Sweet Little Mama," and David Byrne "Wicked Little Doll," and any number of singers have their "babes" and "baby"s. (When Bob Dylan sings "It Aint Me, Babe," endearment is getting replaced by something cooler.) We hear about a big hulking woodsman named Little John, and giants named Tiny. It should hardly be surprising that Lane's poetry sometimes miniaturizes endearingly. In a touching early poem of hers addressed to a dying dog named Winkle ("Goodbye," D), affectionate terms - "oh my little one, lost one. / Handful of sparrow flesh, match bone, fur, / light from a candle end, little dog child" - belie the fact that in canine terms eleven-year-old Winkle is well past middle age. When this brief poem expresses a hope that the dog will "creep under the great fur hammocks" with "the warm beard of night's bush / whelming you down," the small creature would be comforted by something large enough to overshadow, hide, and protect. Another Lane poem of comfort compares "the heart" to a dog ("Poor Thing," ST): "The heart, poor thing, is sick, / won't come to be stroked." Though here Lane doesn't use the adjectives "little" or "small," they're implied in the repeated tender term "poor" and in the narrative: "The poor thing sagged, / stretched in the dirt. The feeble air / fondled its sides. Poor cur, get well." Even if a dog is literally larger than the heart, the effect of Lane's address to the heart is to miniaturize it.

5. Christianity and miniaturization

I would like the spire to be a thousand feet high, he thought, and then I should be able to oversee the whole country; and then he wondered at himself, remembering whose spire it would be.
         - William Golding, The Spire

As a poet deeply informed by Christianity, Lane may celebrate the small partly through the New Testament promise of the meek inheriting the earth (think back to "meek overcoat" in "From the Wings," NP). In the face of divinity, what isn't diminished? Divinity itself is inevitably miniaturized if it's talked about at all: God as Father, Christ as Lamb, cross as crucifix. One of Lane's poems begins, "A lavish hand for little us, God's," reminiscent of the popular hymn "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" (once when I playfully tried to calm and distract my three-year-old daughter by singing that hymn, she dug further into her sulky mood and interrupted, "He's not got me in his hands"). Like most religions, Christianity is built partly upon the embodiment of vast powers in the local dimensions of symbols, pictures, names, stories, rituals. In the autumn section of Lane's "The Seasons," we find "the tinsel Christ child, in its crib," but the poem also goes on to say of everyone: "we are children still, / self-centered, lonely, babyish." A difference here is that the baby Jesus is an early embodiment of ultimate self-sacrifice while mere mortals are "babyish" in a negative sense, spiritually undeveloped in their "self-centered" pride. An even more striking underlining of a Christian element in miniaturization occurs in "Shepherds Awake" (ST), an ekphrasis poem indebted to Rembrandt etching. Like Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," Lane's poem is narrated by one of the observers of Christ's Nativity, and like Eliot's narrator Lane's shepherd offers startling, violent phrasing unconventional in Nativity accounts. Instead of a benign star overhead, we have "an affront," a force that makes everyone "fall over backwards, / cows, sheep, and awkward farmhands," a sign that "shoved its crackling at you, / seemed to yell / as if its brilliant, feathered lights / hung in your liver." That startling image of the liver makes the news of the Incarnation unforgettably intense and internal. The shepherd says, "Something spoke, / some monstrous and inhuman thing / denying statecraft, history, / with the abominations of the small." While the Shepherd says the Incarnation denies history, its very definition entails the entrance of God into history, a humbling of the omnipotent and omnipresent into the scale of life on earth. Thus "the abominations of the small" - the appalling act of the divine assuming the form of a human infant. Lane's poem gives us reason to consider the Incarnation itself a form of miniaturization.

In Lane's longest poem, "Divinations" (56 pages), the third and final monologue is in the voice of a woman named Pearl, introduced in prose by her sister - a victim of polio - as a dwarf and the creator of "the Thrones," a work of art unfinished at the time of her death. The sister, Ruby, says that "the Thrones," "built of cut-up cardboard with wood, wires, chains, painted light bulbs, and other items, all covered in aluminum foil, is "religious but too queer for the church." Pearl says the Thrones are "like the temple of Solomon," but she also calls the garage that houses the art "puny" and she repeatedly associates herself with smallness: "As mollusks sense the tide's turn / I sense dawn," "Ruby, / I was your little dog," "I was the mermaid in my dreams, / the littlest one," "Wrong size or right, / the small grow strong." In her mind The Thrones are a form of worship, not an idol or graven image, but a product of love, of glorifying the divine. From the depths of her spirituality arises Pearl's belief in the value of littleness: "fly wing, beetle eye - holy and blessed / need of the tiny, the pebble world - ." The poem's heroine is not named Pearl without reason. For a contrast to her ambition, we might consider that of the Medieval monk in William Golding's The Spire, whose gigantism and ambition in building a cathedral are his downfall.

I like to imagine Lane's Pearl sitting alone some evenings reading Emily Dickinson, feeling sympathy when she comes across the lines "Save just a space for me / .... / The smallest 'Robe' will fit me / And just a bit of 'Crown' - " (#79), or "I was the slightest in the House - / I took the smallest Room - / At night, my little Lamp, and Book - / And one Geranium," or "And so - upon this wise - I prayed - / Great Spirit - Give to me - / A Heaven not so large at Yours, / But large enough-- for me -" (#476).

6. Miniaturization and women

It was not to name the mountains she was there.
Even her cairns were secret: a hummingbird's
moss thimble, or
a white crop of lichen...
. . . .
She knew the mountains as she knew
the compass of her kitchen....
         - Lane, "Hills" (TS)

In Lane's art affirmations of the "small" and the "local" are sometimes rooted in femininity and feminism. In her discussion of her poem "Hills" in the preface to Temporary Shelter, Lane writes: "The desire to order our apprehensions of nature is identified in the poem with the masculine as opposed to the approach, seen in the poem as feminine, of simply living in flux, immersed, accepting, unstructuring." Lane's prose assertions aren't absolute, instead qualified with "identified in the poem" and "seen in the poem" - nods to the specific dramatic nature of one poem. The least acquaintance with Lane's poems also reveals how much they show the impossibility of "simply living in flux...accepting," a state no human being has likely ever achieved. Moreover, Lane's preface then steers away from reductiveness: "Yet it is wrong to insist that the imposition of order upon nature is masculine. Housewife Eve also named animals." Later in the preface we read: "At present, resistence to theory like mine is often characterized as either Anglo-Saxon or feminine. In me it is largely Emersonian, pragmatic, transcendentalist, a function of reason." This isn't to deny that, in their ongoing changes and byways, Lane's poems continue to hint at a relationship between "the female" and an accepting mode of mind that treasures the quotidian and the small in scale. Such an emphasis is found less often in male poets than in female ones, such as Elizabeth Bishop (like Lane a graduate of Vassar College) or, from the province of Quebec next door to Lane's New Brunswick, Robyn Sarah. (A recent poem of Sarah's begins and ends with the line "Make much of something small," and is entitled "Bounty.")

Lane's poem "Point of Order" (KA) is one of her more explicit statements against "theory" that undermines the values of the local and the specific. It questions "a mind / that can conceive / entirety in a single phrase" and those who "write entire on Poetry / as if they had the whole of it in hand." More pointedly, the middle of the poem comments: "Great men have small circumference. / We women know it." Humour leavens the mix, lightens the load of rhetoric: "What Pontiff Proclamation could exalt, / make into flags or forums, what / mere mothers taught?" Certainly the poem at this point sets up an opposition between a "Great" male tradition and the sensibleness of "women" and "mothers." Yet in the next stanza Lane goes on, "Such follies fill us all / exclusive to no sex." Gender has receded as the crucial issue when she concludes the poem:

Palace on palace of theory.
Avoid them all.
Such sayings are too huge.
They will not fit
you, or your tiny circumstance,
or us, or it.

It's clear that Lane has a particular take on "theory" - as detached from felt life, unfriendly toward "minor" modes of feeling, overly confident, guilty of distorting gigantism - rather than flexible, exploratory, and skeptical in a late Emersonian fashion (or the way a poet like Erin Mouré sees it). In "Point of Order," despite all its outlining of divisions, the war between "theory" and "tiny circumstance" is complex, and she doesn't claim to have finally abandoned the former for the latter. As she says, "Such follies fill us all." A close reading of her poems also demonstrates how at times the struggle for naming, structure, and belief beyond the pleasures of minor moments is a worthy, very human struggle not to be given up.

Several times in Lane's long poems women are associated with both the virtues and drawbacks of smallness. The narrator of "The Homecoming," a Penelope for whom Ithaca "is often rural New Brunswick," sharply criticizes Odysseus for his "lies of war, / of giants, of ghosts in the gullies, / of great black kine / with human tongues." In her mind, fascination and fictionalizing with the grandiose and the giant are seen as irresponsible, adolescent, while at home she is busy with agriculture, wall-building, weir-minding, net-knitting. If this Penelope labours over the minutiae of daily life, however, the final section of her poem suggests her love for something larger than anything imagined by Odysseus: that archetypal symbol and presence of vastness, the sea, "my husband, true husband, the salt sea, / mutterer, snorer, and singer, friend, / my sealskin side on these long nights." A combination of gigantism and miniaturization is evident again: even while expressing her love for the salt sea, Penelope miniaturizes it as her snoring, singing, beloved husband. This brings to mind a phrase of Bachelard's that serves as a title for one chapter of The Poetics of Space: "intimate immensity."

The narrator of another long poem, "The Witch of the Inner Wood" (R), makes and cooks "small men" out of cookie dough, feels "the wet earth cling[ing] around me like a child," and likens Free Will to a cat that "loves me for his purposes, / not mine, / my small, designing / colleague." This good witch's mind is healthily miniaturizing. In clear contrast to that witch and the dwarf artist Pearl, both female, is the West Coast male artist in another long poem, "The Letter" (H), who builds a "garden of towers," a physically massive work of art which causes skeptics to say, "They got too big. He takes it all too serious. / He's crazy, man!" There are hints of the Tower of Babel in this artist's efforts. Much of the time he seems unselfconscious of his own pride: "When man made steel / he made a better rock than God"; "Why should I go to church. My towers are church. / They're taller than the church." At other times, especially toward the end of the thirty-year span of his musings that form the poem, he suffers from doubts about his own gigantism: "I stood proud in the land I thought it was, / I was the Man, Columbus, Caesar, Jefferson" - the hyperbole there suggesting that his hunger for making an impression through magnitude caught up with him. For the tower-builder of "The Letter," as for Golding's monk, physical magnitude is crucial. He wouldn't be the best reader for Dickinson's poem #451: "The Outer - from the Inner / Derives its Magnitude - / 'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according / As is the Central Mood." For him, the outer seems to derive its magnitude from the outer. While Lane avoids overly easy gender polarization, and it may be quite possible to re-imagine the artist Pearl as a male, it's hard to re-imagine the builder of the "garden of towers" as female.

7. A walk with Lane

Take a walk in Lane's neighbourhood in Fredericton with a copy of her most recent book, Keeping Afloat, in your hand. The sky overhead iseems immeasurable, a consciousness - stretching blue. You step out of the way of a bronze-backed beetle. Find a tree to sit under, and open the book to the poem "Kite." You find a parable of tension between contrasting degrees of magnitude. You read about a desire to transcend the plentitude of discrete phenomena: "I want to leave Things / knowing that they are / perfect and sealed in their chill light / while I go on." The departure from all the small things of existence is an ascent, first with a ladder image, then with the title's kite. You read of the poet ascending as the poem moves into italics; she feels the ladder swaying, sees that far below "the herd of days / browses and shuffles in wet, rank fields." The heights may at first be attractive - "The wind is fresh" - but nervousness soon sets in, as the wind's "brown voice crowds me - / a storm of fish, or a kind of surf," and a light-house "blinds and blackens / and re-blinds." The poet finds that she's "dizzy with distance" and her "long cord jerks." That cord, kite-attached but more subtly umbilical, brings the poet downward, "back to the basket of small things."

Think of a couple of poets in Lane's background - Frost with the temptation of heights and the subsequent descent back to earth in "Birches," Wilbur with "Love Calls Us To The Things of This World." In all three poets, there's faith in and faithfulness to "small things," but also a yearning for magnitude that will not be silenced for long. A great river, the St. John, shines blue in the distance, down the steep hill of the small city. A goldfinch takes its dipping flight over the street. Wing-seeds from the maple trees are scattered over the lawns.

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The primary sources in this essay are the books of M. Travis Lane, identified with the following abbreviations:

D = Divinations and Shorter Poems 1973-1978 (Fredericton: Fiddlehead, 1980).
H = Homecomings: Narrative Poems (Fredericton: Fiddlehead, 1977).
IS = An Inch or So of Garden (Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1969).
KA = Keeping Afloat (Toronto: Guernica, 2001).
NP = Night Physics (London: Brick, 1994).
P = Poems 1969-1972 (Fredericton: Fiddlehead, 1972).
R = Reckonings: Poems 1979-85 (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1988).
ST = Solid Things: Poems New and Selected (Dunvegan: Cormorant, 1989).
TS = Temporary Shelter (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1993).

The source of Lane's comment about her poetry speaking for her better than her prose is found on the "Author's Comment" for Night Physics in the on-line League of Canadian Poets Bookstore (www.poets.ca). Other sources include M. Travis Lane, "The Muskrat in his Brook," The Fiddlehead 100 (1974); Frances Armstrong, "Gender and Miniaturization: Games of Littleness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction," English Studies in Canada 16.4 (1990): 403-16; Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon, 1964); William Golding, The Spire (London: Faber, 1964); Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960) ; Ross Leckie, Gravity's Plumb Line (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2005); Robyn Sarah, A Day's Grace (Erin: Porcupine's Quill, 2003); Henry David Thoreau, "Resistence to Civil Government" (available in many editions).