Everything Arrives at the Light

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.