Instinct

by Joel Lane

Joel Lane is the author of three full-length poetry collections, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartlands and The Autumn Myth (all from Arc). His other work includes two novels, a novella, a booklet of crime stories and three collections of ghost stories. He lives in Birmingham, where he works as a journalist.Instinct is a selection of erotic poems written over 25 years.

Staple Bound

About the author

Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic and anthology editor. He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 and the British Fantasy Award twice.

Born in Exeter, he was the nephew of tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott. At the time of his death, Lane was living in south Birmingham, where he worked in health industry-related publishing. His location frequently provided settings for his fiction.

Reviews

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

23 poems by Joel Lane

“I miss the loneliness that was ours
to share, when we walked in the city
and explored its waste ground. …”

A rarified experience in poem-absorption for me, as we cross serial frontiers of blank album tracks and pinned shadows and other stubs of things: a sense of love in often unnatural enjambment, while paradoxically the poems themselves seem somehow artfully to have a natural enjambment. Tomorrow, when I re-read the poems – as I must – such (un)naturalness will become vice versa, I predict, with each reading changing, if only a bit, the meaning of the previous reading … forever? The unfree buildings of emotional relationship as free verse. Then vice versa again? It is impossible of course to do justice to these dark panoplies as we scale the poems from story to story within their inferred brutalist architecture. A constructed, constructive sadness and pent up eroticism although ‘eroticism’ is not the right word and I can’t think of the right word. Perhaps tomorrow. Perfect notes of memory sweeping back and forth.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a good poetry reader. I race through things too quickly, I'm not attuned to style. I prefer works which play with words, that doesn't rhyme them. Whilst I love Lane's longer works, knowing them so well leaves me foreshortened when it comes to his poetry. I want more than is on the page. Bearing all this in mind, I enjoyed some of the pieces here, was indifferent towards others. The tendency towards overcomplicating uncomplicated relationships wasn't lost on me, Lane is adept at this, but I seek his voice in other works.