Product Description

In this exquisitely written memoir, poet Patrick Lane describes his raw and tender emergence at age sixty from a lifetime of alcohol and drug addiction. He spent the first year of his sobriety close to home, tending his garden, where he cast his mind back over his life, searching for the memories he'd tried to drown in vodka. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden's life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past. What the Stones Remember is the emerging chronicle of Lane's attempt to face those memories, as well as his new self—to rediscover his life. In this powerful and beautifully written book, Lane offers readers an unflinching and unsentimental account of coming to one's senses in the presence of nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #958144 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In January 2001, Canadian poet Lane emerged from two months in an addiction treatment center, sober after 45 years of steady, heavy drinking and drug use. He had to learn to live with a raw new self at age 62, and this book, part memoir, part diary, told month by month, chronicles his first year, retrieves his past and records the seasonal cycle of the garden he tends on Vancouver Island. Lane's parents were both alcoholics from mill and mining towns where heavy drinking and family brutality were normal. His impressionistic memories, painful and poetic, probe the secrets of his younger self. Lane's now-dead mother, beautiful, overworked with five children, unfaithful to his father during WWII, a gardener herself and quite mad for part of her life, haunts him literally—he sees her in the garden at hallucinatory moments—and at the end of this extraordinary year he brings himself to forgive her. The signal event of this period is Lane's marriage in August to his longtime companion, poet Lorna Crozier, but readers will find that almost incidental to Lane's remarkable nature writing: animals, birds and insects, flowers, moss and trees are as vivid as memory.
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From The Washington Post
What the Stones Remember, by the Canadian poet Patrick Lane, is at the same time a meditation and a lament. For 45 years, Lane was addicted to alcohol and drugs. He began writing this memoir when he was entering a period of sobriety, having just emerged from an addiction treatment center. He was 62 years old. This is the story of the beginnings of his recovery. In the sure and steady hands of a writer at the peak of his power, it is an achingly beautiful journey.

The chronicling of one full year takes place in British Columbia as Lane tends the garden around his home. Like composer Sofia Gubaidulina's intricate "Garden of Joys and Sorrows," this garden has room for every emotion; it is a garden of loss and recovery. With attention to the smallest detail, Lane moves us from one season to the next, always recognizing his own fragility amid the fragility and hardiness around him. His descriptions of plants, animals, birds and insects are reminiscent of a Japanese watercolor -- imbued with delicate but stark imagery yet intimating the presence of underlying order and calm. The garden becomes an extended poem: What is not there is just as important as what is.

"A stone upon a path knows more than I do of the rain," he writes. "The hummingbird's heart has a rhythm greater than Gilgamesh, the snail's shell more intricate than the stones of Sacsahuaman. When I listen closely in the garden rooms there is a great singing in the earth and in the air that shelters it. The tiniest forms seethe in their immensity. A black ant walking across the pebbled path by the pond follows a trail she and her cohorts laid down a million years ago. There was a time I would have said I was oblivious to the ant, but no more."

But gardens contain death and disorder, too. From time to time, Lane finds full bottles of vodka, stashed, buried, hidden during past rampages of alcoholism. Each time he finds a bottle, he takes it inside and drains it into the sink. His addiction is a "creature awake on its wet paws. It never sleeps. Quiet and cunning, it watches my every move for a sign of weakness." While Lane makes careful plans to blend species in his garden, his conflicted memories rise to the surface. Expertly woven into the miniaturist's vision of the natural world is his search through a past that includes the murder of his father, the premature death of a brother, family mayhem, his own divorces, turbulent relationships with his children and an agonizing desire for belonging that was denied him in childhood.

"Everywhere my imagination looked I found violence," he writes. But he also finds "moments of such joy that to remember them makes me reel through the thin air of the past." Lane's slow recovery is also a discovery. He has the courage to try to understand what went wrong, yet he knows that some memories must be left alone. He wants to recover his fleeting sense of childhood. The past appears "in stunned cameos, in anecdotal fragments. Each memory seems colored like some mad child's painting of spring." He wants to understand the causes of despair and destruction that to this point have defined his life. All the while, his addiction "sleeps with its claws in my mind." One feels that he is trying to re-enter innocence. The momentum and the urgency of the book entice us to search for our own innocence as we accompany him on the journey. In some ways, it is like nudging a rock to see the hidden life beneath.

Lane's commitment to his art and his love of language have been, in part, his escape and his salvation. The publication of his first poems in 1961 was a turning point. After that, no matter what happened, he never stopped writing, whether in remote mining towns, working at sawmills, through decades of shifting and moving and drinking and aggression. This book is, importantly, about finding ways to forgive himself. It is always about love, not the least of which is Lane's love for his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier, who has stuck by him for the past 22 years. The book is also about friendship, coexistence, love of even the tiniest creature that lurks or hides or swoops overhead or revels and plays in the garden.

The overall impression is that of a man who knows much and who is stepping softly. He moves through his garden with fear and quiet exultation. His memories are never self-pitying, but there is a sorrowful beauty to the strong, poetic language. Despite the savage reality of the revelations, there is a peacefulness, a maturity of vision that is a pure gift to the reader.

Reviewed by Frances Itani
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"Possibly the best-written book published in 2004. This is a masterpiece."—Brian Bethune, Macleans (Canada) "His lyric, seemingly effortless observations of living things drenched in light and water are mesmerizing. But like the hidden vodka bottles that surface in his garden like stones in a field, potent memories rupture the serene present."— Quill & Quire , starred review

Customer Reviews

What the Stones Remember
This memoir by one of Canada's best-known poets follows Patrick Lane's first year of recovery from a lifetime of alcoholism, a recovery that unfolds almost entirely in his Vancouver Island garden. The narrative weaves between his present-tense garden and the struggle and brutality that was Lane's past. His poetic voice permeates his storytelling, compelling us to see how the honesty and enchantment of the natural world can save us from our nightmares, our addictions, our terrible losses - if only we will let it.

Originally published a year and a half ago in Canada as There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden, the book won the 2005 BC Award for Canadian nonfiction. It is not at all disingenuous for Lane to re-release his memoir under a new title - What the Stones Remember - as there really are two stories folded into the one book. This new title summons the story of Lane's turbulent past as a wayward child, an absentee father, a fledgling poet, a failed husband, a triumphant writer, and ultimately a recovering addict. We follow him deep into his personal history and come to understand, along with him, that it is a miracle he is still alive. This story is rich with personal intrigue, gossip, sentimentality and curiosity. I think it's rare that we look even into our own lives so intimately.

The second story is the simple unfolding of the seasons in his suburban garden, and it mirrors Lane's journey of recovery and self-redemption. His garden is his sanctuary and the midwife of his rebirth as a sane and sober person. He delves into the ecology of his garden with the same studied depth as he digs through his personal history. The carefully documented hours of observation are underscored by a book knowledge of plant and animal classification, behaviour and habitat.

This being said, Lane is first and foremost a poet, and his garden ramblings are never dry or dense. How can they be when he periodically unearths old vodka bottles in the woodpile or under a bush? Or when he stops to watch a hermit thrush dance and mourn beside its dead mate? Or sees his mother, long decades dead, kneeling in the corner under the plum tree?

What the Stones Remember contains equal parts beauty and horror. Patrick Lane describes a past that many people would be inclined to leave buried in the furrows of time. But in bringing forth the dead, the wounded, the lost, this poet carves a path of healing and new life.

"A Wound Remembers"
I can't believe I'm the first reviewer to take a stab at WHAT THE STONES REMEMBER, A LIFE REDISCOVERED. Everyone I know is reading this book! It's especially good for people who are just undergoing recovery, those who will recognize and nod with wonder at the pain Lane describes at just waking up and experiencing the little things, the color of your bedroom walls, the feel of the cotton pillowcase under your cheek, as if for the first time, without the sheltering batting of cocaine or alcohol. He thinks of the American poet Weldon Kees who, fueled by despair and drink jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in the early 1950s, and of Kees' famous zen riddle, "Whatever it is that a wound remembers/ After the healing ends."

Lane finds the courage to remember the years before he fell into heavy drinking, and what a dreary lot of memories he dredges up! Okay, there were some happy moments too--a sensuous description of lovemaking at age 16 with the girl who would become his first wife--but mostly he grew up in Canada, a misbegotten part of the world with more casual brutality, sexual violence, and abuse against childred than you will find in Ghana or Sierra Leone. For pocket money he sold himself to pedophiles, for a quarter here or a dollar there, allowing them to buy him forbidden ice cream sundaes in depressing town dessert joints. At another time he watches from between parked cars as three white men brutally rape and torture a native Indian woman. For Lane, youth is an unusual place, marked by the absence of his dad during World War II and by the remarkably hard-earned wisdom of a lovely mother, with a caustic wit which, who knows, might have contributed to Lane's own dexterity with words.

I don't like his poetry very much, and it's a shame that he feels he has to quote from it in this book, but as a memoirist he really shines. After getting out of the treatment clinic, he goes to work on his garden, like Candide, but even there memories of different things that happened to him sometimes leap up and assault his senses so that he'd do anything to have just one drink! And sometimes he finds bottles of vodka hidden around the house, and garden too. Malcolm Lowry probably said just as well and earlier to boot everything that Patrick Lane has to say about the sadnesses of Western Canada, the glittering allure of drink, and the repentance of women's arms, but Lowry (author of UNDER THE VOLCANO and one of Lane's literary heroes) has been gone a longtime, the victim of his own alcoholism, and Lane lives on, triumphantly speaking of a new marriage to another of Canada's notable literary figures, a woman who he calls "Lorna" here. Maybe her real name is Lorna too, but in any case you get the idea he's trying to protect the innocent and to lacerate only himself and his people.

I predict a long future for this book if only more people knew about it besides people in recovery.

BOOK REVIEW
DEPRESSING BUT HOPEFUL BOOK ABOUT RECOVERY FROM DRUG AND ALCOLHOL ADDICTION AND RETURN TO NORMAL, SOBER LIFE.