Lorna Crozier

In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her. “God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.

What the Soul Doesn't Want

From Lorna Crozier, the poet that Ursula Le Guin called a “truth teller” and “visionary,” comes this new collection of soul-stirring poems that follow the death of a loved one. After That is a book written from the dark hollow we fall into when we lose those we love. Lorna Crozier’s sure poetry finds the words to engage with the grief that comes from the death of her partner, the writer Patrick Lane, whom she’d lived with for forty years, many of them tumultuous. With grace and precision, she illuminates sorrow. The light the poems cast travels far enough to reach anyone who has experienced loss. These pages engage us with many familiar yet magical things—not only paper wasps, but their libraries; not only herons, but their role as aging monks. Crozier takes us through the domestic and natural worlds into the cagey and metaphysical place we call the beyond. Without offering false comfort, the poems turn over our own grief so that we can catch a glimpse of the new life inside us again.

Poems

After That

Patrick Lane

Quiet in Me

God of Shadows

A Globe and Mail 100 Best Book Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalist, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize A deeply affecting portrait of a long partnership and a clear-eyed account of the impact of a serious illness, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry from one of Canada's most celebrated voices. When we ran off together in 1978, abandoning our marriages and leaving wreckage in our wake, I was a "promising writer," Patrick had just won the Governor General's Award. I was so happy for him, and I've continued to be every time an honour comes his way, but I knew if I didn't grow, if I remained merely someone who showed potential, we wouldn't last. I swore I wouldn't play the dutiful wife, cheerleader, and muse of the great male writer, and he didn't envision a partner like that. We aspired to flourish together and thrive in words and books and gardens. When Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane met at a poetry workshop in 1976, they had no idea that they would go on to write more than forty books between them, balancing their careers with their devotion to each other, and to their beloved cats, for decades. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed unexpectedly when Patrick became seriously ill. Despite tests and the opinions of many specialists, doctors remained baffled. There was no diagnosis and no effective treatment plan. The illness devastated them both. During this time, Lorna turned to her writing as a way of making sense of her grief and for consolation. She revisited her poems, tracing her own path as a poet along with the evolution of her relationship with Patrick. The result is an intimate and intensely moving memoir about the difficulties and joys of creating a life with someone and the risks and immense rewards of partnership. At once a spirited account of the past and a poignant reckoning with the present, it is, above all, an extraordinary and unforgettable love story. Told with unflinching honesty and fierce tenderness, Through the Garden is a candid, clear-eyed portrait of a long partnership and an acknowledgement, a tribute, and a gift.

A Love Story (with Cats)

Through the Garden

Whetstone

poems

Small mechanics

Renowned poet Lorna Crozier offers a masterful collection of poems inspired by Diane Laundy and Peter Coffman’s photographs taken in the Frontenac Arch Biosphere in Southwestern Ontario. Beginning in this setting, The House the Spirit Builds extends to include any region, any place that ignites the human mind and heart. Something astonishing happens when the poems and photos sit side by side and speak to one another in a language that is timeless, lucid and precise: they bring us to a wisdom that might mitigate the damage we do to others and the natural world. While acknowledging the loss and suffering that infuse our days, the poems and photographs invite us to expand our sense of wonder, our sense that all things are connected, no matter where we live. An image of a slice of light falling across a tablecloth, a black beetle on a leaf: these poems speak of moments “when the dragonfly lands and grips the skin / on the back of your hand” or “rain stops falling / but / hangs around / like the shape of lust / in bedsheets.” The impressions and expressions vary, but remind us that if we pay attention, even the smallest things can bring us joy and remind us we are not alone in our brief sojourn on this earth.

The House the Spirit Builds

The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising. How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen? The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn't know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting. What life-affirming questions have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so profound, original and lively, and also so much fun?

A radiant collection of new poems from one of Canada's most renowned and well-read poets. Brilliantly poised between the mythic and the everyday, the anecdotal and the delicately lyrical, these poems contain the wit, irreverence, and startling imagery for which Crozier is justly celebrated. They include the intimate and sometimes difficult conversations between husbands and wives, shadowed as they often are by faithlessness, compromise, and other betrayals; the ways in which crows, owls, and deers size up the humans around them and find them wanting ( More rapacious than us, more needy./They never take the shortest route/and use too many words when a caw would do. ); memories of a past whose influences and ghosts are still felt in the present.

The Wrong Cat

A Globe and Mail top 100 book of 2012 In a series of playful and startling prose meditations, celebrated writer Lorna Crozier brings her rapt attention to the small matter of household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a sort of literary detective, she examines the mystery of the everyday, seeking the essence of each object. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and navels. Longing, exuberance, and grief colour her reflections, which at times take on the tenor of folktales or parables. Each of the short portraits in The Book of Marvels stands alone, but the connections are intricate; as in life, each object gains meaning from its juxtaposition with others. Crozier approaches her investigations with a childlike curiosity, an adult bemusement, and an unfailing sense of metaphor and mischief. With both charm and mordant wit, she animates the panoply of wonders to be found everywhere around us and inside us.

A Compendium of Everyday Things

The Book of Marvels

The Weather

Lorna Crozier’s new collection contains a community of poems whose words are lit from within. The book is a home that holds children and adults, the living and the dead. It is a brilliant gathering of poems with a richly dark seam of terrors, populated with lovers, friends, and relations both difficult and dear. Among its other loves are mimulus, prickly pear, a cockatoo, a stallion, “lilacs, literal and magical,” Waskesieu, and carpenter ants in leather aprons. Details, surfaces, shine in these poems which are nevertheless “obsessed with the invisible.” They move with great tenderness through the luminous quotidian, and, still deeply respecting the literal, shift into myth. The breadth and warmth ofEverything Arrives at the Lightwill confirm and extend Lorna Crozier’s reputation as one of Canada’s most popular and accomplished poets.

Everything Arrives at the Light

Uher Lorna

The poems in No Longer Two People are a conversation between poets, exploring connections and the "vibration of life."

A Series of Poems

No Longer Two People

Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, Lorna Crozier’s seventh book of poetry, reinforces her stature as one of the most prolific and respected contemporary poets of our time. Her poems are witty, unassuming, yet intimate and provocative. Through her extraordinary vision, Crozier writes into existence a world that is both distinctively her own and instinctively familiar to all her readers. These are poems of mourning and celebration, of poignancy and good humour. And they demonstrate why Lorna Crozier’s work lays claim on both the head and the heart. The poems in the section “Angles of Silence” won first prize for poetry in the CBC Radio Literature Competition for 1987-88, and were broadcast on “State of the Arts.” The Chilean poems were aired on “State of the Arts” as part of a radio script written with Pat Lane, which won the Best Program Award at the National Radio Awards, 1988. “Fear of Snakes” won second prize inPrism International’s poetry competition.

Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence

In these remarkable poems, Lorna Crozier reveals the power of the ghazal to move the reader with insight and spiritual depth. In an afterword, Crozier illuminates the pursuit of the ghazal by some of Canada's greatest poets.

Ghazals

Bones in Their Wings

While far-reaching in their universal truths, the poems in this extraordinary and moving book come together as a compelling narrative. Some of the poems trace the lives – from conception to death – of two families: Crozier’s own family and that of another, shadow family, trapped in a darker, unrelenting world. While more serious than her earlier collections, it still celebrates the joys of living as only she can do, and reminds us of the transcendent resonance of each breath we take.

What the Living Won't Let Go

Chapbook of poetry by fifteen poets, written during a week at Wintergreen Studios with poet and teacher Lorna Crozier.

Sound Me When I'm Done

A chapbook of poetry produced by sixteen poets in the spring of 2017 at Wintergreen Studios, during a poetry workshop with Lorna Crozier.

Lorna Crozier

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