Lorna Crozier

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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.

 

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