Frona Lane — Collected Poems

Frona Lane wrote poems that refuse to stay in one shape. The devotional and public lyrics of Apples of Gold give way in Third Eyelid to sharpened images, psychological unease, shifting margins, dream sequences, and poems that seem to examine the mind from inside its own machinery. Worm, Feed Gently, and Other Poems pushes further into mortality, desire, war, domestic fracture, and the comedy of consciousness. Lane taught poetry, dramatics, and public speaking in Los Angeles adult schools, and her own account of modern verse praised crossed images, verbal conceits, free association, and rhythm released from inherited expectation. Those principles animate a body of work that ranges from radio and newspaper verse to experimental sequences and privately printed books. Collected Poems follows that development and recovers an inventive Los Angeles modernist whose formal restlessness was the core of her practice.