What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick Lane
Publisher: Trumpeter
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 203513
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 159030389X
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781590303894
ASIN: 159030389X
Publication Date: December 12, 2006
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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.
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| Customer Reviews:
 BOOK REVIEW June 16, 2008
J. N. Childs (jacksonville, Florida)
DEPRESSING BUT HOPEFUL BOOK ABOUT RECOVERY FROM DRUG AND ALCOLHOL ADDICTION AND RETURN TO NORMAL, SOBER LIFE.
This is a must read for 12 Steppers February 16, 2008
Dick T. (Pittsburgh, PA)
As a 60 year old male recovering from my own life of addiction, I was somewhat resentful when I first read the reviews for this wonderful book -"how dare someone write my life's story!" was my first thought. Having read the book, however, I am glad that Patrick Lane took the time to write such a moving and poignant story. His skills as a poet echo throughout every chapter of the book. The peace he finds in his garden stands in total contrast to the chaos he put himself through for forty five years. As a member of a 12 Step fellowship who followed almost the exact same path (minus the gardening skills), I have told all the other men in my program that this book will help them find a piece of themselves - and ultimately peace for themselves. Lane's book will be a cornerstone for the foundation I am building in my own recovery.
 What the Stones Remember July 28, 2006
ascent magazine (Montreal Canada)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
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" April 16, 2006
Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
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