Pen Portrait - Heather Lane
She worked for 30 years in Cambridge libraries, archives and museums, latterly as Librarian & Keeper of Collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute. She was part of the Thresholds project, which brought ten poets in residence into the university's museums and collections. In 2015, she moved to the Yorkshire Dales, returning to Cambridge in 2017-18 to oversee the remodelling of the University Museum of Zoology.
She now lives in Littondale and runs a cultural heritage consultancy practice. She enjoys gardening, theatre and classical music, and is an avid visitor to museums and heritage sites. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies. In 2023, she was asked by composer Cecilia McDowall to write the lyrics for A Tree is a Song, a work for unaccompanied choir commissioned by the International Association of Music Libraries and published by Oxford University Press. The following poem formed part of the Polar Muse exhibition, curated by Heather in Cambridge in 2014, which was the subject of a special supplement in PN Review. |
The thing is ...
you come striding in, ambushing life, questioning what it is to be old, defying the mind's age; ordering the helter-skelter scatter of seeing. No craft can steer away from the reefs and shoals of phenomenon, ways of matching, subterranean biology, a thought world in which ambergris and witch-hazel taste the same and relic whalebone is both touchstone and a dream of flying. Seek the world's magic in toadstone and taro stone, evidence of unicorn and leviathan, the magnetic tug of each pole, navigating by shadow and constraint. A sigh is catalyst, folding time's coastline, a breath between ages, through contiguous strata; a delicate erosion. The object is resonant with shared thought: silicate fusion, refracting at the boundary. Smooth skinned youth, your fragile sheen an intercessor, bright as the limbs of southern beeches in the winter light; the compass nail conducts both souls and lightning; truth is written on the glass. The thing is ... was exhibited as part of The Polar Muse project at the Polar Museum, University of Cambridge, 2014. |