Southern Range: Collected Longer Poems, 1980-2022

Since the early 1980s John 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 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 tour de 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 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 swirling waters where these poems were made.＂

John Lane is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including eight from Mercer University Press. He has won the Louisville Review Prize and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award. His ABANDONED QUARRY: NEW & SELECTED POEMS won the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book of the Year prize in 2012. In 2014 he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. A cofounder of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Lane also taught creative writing and environmental studies at Wofford College for over three decades.