Lorna Crozier
Lorna Crozier
Biography
Lorna Crozier’s latest poetry books is God of Shadows. An Officer of the Order of Canada she has received three awards for lifetime achievement, including BC’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award. Three-time winner of the Pat Lowther Award and four-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award, which she won in 1992, she was recently honoured with China’s Chen Zi Ang Award for best international poet published in 2017 in China’s biggest literary periodical. Her 2020 memoir, Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), was nominated for the Hilary Weston Prize and made the list of the Globe and Mail’s top one hundred books of the year.
Poetics Statement
“I write because I still believe that words have magic, that they can change things, like the Medicine Man who gives my friend a Cree name to treat her cancer because the herbs he’s prescribing wouldn’t recognize her without it.
If the heart could speak, it would speak poetry. If the soul could speak, it would speak poetry.
All the poems that existed, that originated in song and stories, live deep in the earth around us; they flow under our feet like an underground stream. Contemporary poetry taps into it, consciously or not, and draws the water of that ancient music into itself. A poet feels she might be onto something when her words are wet with it.
I have always wanted to turn what’s been silent into language, whether it’s been the silence of the poor and culturally deprived like the family I grew up in, the silence of women, the silence of the animals we are destroying, or the silence of lost places. Breaking from muteness into utterance requires a huge amount of psychic energy: it creates sparks and those sparks start fires that push back the cold and draw us close to one another in the long nights. When the words resist, there’s a tenderness, a vulnerability, even a fear, and that fear is a sure sign that something worthwhile, something significant, needs to be said.”
Sample of Poet's Work
FEAR OF SNAKES
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
the darkness at the heart of things. I remember
when my fear of snakes left for good.
It fell behind me like an old skin. In Swift Current
the boys found a huge snake and chased me
down the alleys, Larry Moen carrying it like a green torch,
the others yelling, Drop it down her back, my terror
of its sliding in the runnel of my spine (Larry,
the one who touched the inside of my legs on the swing,
an older boy we knew we shouldn’t get close to
with our little dresses, our soft skin), my brother
saying, Let her go, and I crouched behind the caraganas,
watched Larry nail the snake to a telephone pole.
It twisted on twin points of light, unable to crawl
out of its pain, its mouth opening, the red
tongue tasting its own terror, I loved it then,
that snake. The boys standing there with their stupid hands
dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green
mouth opening, a terrible dark O
no one could hear.
MY LAST EROTIC POEM
Who wants to hear about
two old farts getting it on
in the back seat of a Buick,
in the garden shed among vermiculite,
in the kitchen where we should be drinking
ovaltine and saying no? Who wants to hear
about 26 years of screwing,
our once-not-unattractive flesh
now loose as unbaked pizza dough
hanging between two hands before it’s tossed?
Who wants to hear about two old lovers
slapping together like water hitting mud,
hair where there shouldn’t be
and little where there should,
my bunioned foot sliding
up your bony calf, your calloused hands
sinking in the quickslide of my belly,
our faithless bums crepitous, collapsed?
We have to wear our glasses to see down there!
When you whisper what you want I can’t hear,
but do it anyway, and somehow get it right. Face it,
some nights we’d rather eat a Haagen Dazs ice cream bar
or watch a movie starring Nick Nolte who looks worse than us.
Some nights we’d rather stroke the cats.
Who wants to know when we get it going
we’re revved up, like the first time--honest--
like the first time, if only we could remember it,
our old bodies doing what you know
bodies do, worn and beautiful and shameless.
A SUMMER’S SINGING
Where does that singing start, you know,
that thin sound—almost pure light?
Not the birds at false dawn or their song
when morning comes, feathered throats
warm with meaning. A different kind of music.
Listen, it is somewhere near you.
In the heart, emptied of fear,
stubbornly in love
with itself at last, the old
desires a ruined chorus,
a radiant, blood choir.
Where does the singing start?
Here, where you are, there’s room
between your heartbeats,
as if everything you have ever been
begins, inside, to sing.
(Lorna Crozier, from Everything Arrives at the Light)
LET THERE BE ANGELS
William Blake heard angels singing.
I wonder what you heard at the end.
The trauma doctor said Talk to him if you want,
he can hear you. This was before he turned off
the machine. I talked to you between kisses,
I kissed your mouth, your eyes, lowered the sheet
and kissed your chest and belly,
I took your long feet in my hands and kissed your toes
and the pale souls mapped with where you’d walked
for almost eighty years. I took the palms
of your hands and laid them on me, the last time
they would touch me, I held each hand between mine
the way I’d hold a broken bird, I talked, I didn’t say anything
that would surprise you, but my mouth was busy—maybe
you weren’t pleased, you wanted more; in times that mattered
we always tried to say something
the other didn’t know.