On Old Cape Cod

These are poems written by someone who understood that the sea takes everything eventually, and loves the Cape all the more for it. Lane's verses move through Cape Cod like tide water through salt marsh, capturing the haunted shoals of Monomoy, the whistling buoy at Nauset, storms at Race Point, and the ancient logbooks of old captains who no longer sail. He writes of widows keeping vigil, of abandoned hulks rotting on sand, of Billingsgate and Hog's Back Church, places already lost to memory when these poems were composed. There is grief here, but it is the honest kind that comes from loving something fragile. The natural world sings through every page: sandpipers at dawn, wild geese heading south, beach plums and goldenrod, fog rolling in at midnight. This is poetry for anyone who has stood on a New England shore and felt the weight of all the lives that came before, the boats that didn't return, the lighthouses still standing watch over nothing. Lane builds monuments out of words for a way of life that was already vanishing in 1957, and continues to vanish today.