Lane's poems are more visceral than cerebral and are not abstract at all. At their most representative they focus on a specific person or place in his life, such as a whore or a lumberjack, a jail cell or a highway, and they are characterized by a general surefootedness and realism through which he sprinkles the occasional brilliant image, the odd burst of poetry so pure it makes you squirm. This places him in direct contrast with those who favour the halting and the indirect, who esteem the distillation of experience to the point where the poem is the residue of the moment and the thought. Likewise it removes him from those of the other popular extreme for whom the poem is a topical thing dashed off to preserve the moment of its birth; who do not eliminate, rework and reshape but who believe in the blanket method of trying to isolate truths. In the age of extremists, then, Lane is a moderate who does not see a potential poem in every experience and who does not too much belabour, according to fashion, those things he does undertake. He goes his own way, without followers but with at least one teacher.

For many years associated with West Coast writing, he seems in this retrospective collection [The Sun Has Begun to Eat the Mountain] to be at his best in several cases when dealing with British Columbia. The best instance is a longer poem called "Sam Sam the Candy Man."… It is a childhood memory of the town simpleton and his death in the local pool room. It is violent in its nostalgia and in technique is an extension of such poems as "Bunkhouse North," in which one man's senseless toying with his well-oiled rifle brings sad and vicious responses from his fellow workers…. (p. 35)

As a troubadour, as a Minnesinger, as one who—in the tradition of Vachel Lindsay, W. H. Davies and scores of other poets of even less acclaim—has given his poems away in exchange for bread, [Lane] has gone back in a way to an earlier time's idea of what the poet should be and has had little to do with the modern notion of the poet as academic or academic-without-portfolio or of the professional experimenter moving in his or her own circle. The consequences have been freedom from misrepresentation, freedom from classification and … a near-complete denial of his rightful place as a solid, substantial Canadian poet of the generation now in full flower. This collection … should be read with a view toward rediscovery. (p. 37)