Lorna Crozier

(b.1941). Born and raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Crozier earned a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1969. She married a high-school chemistry teacher, completed a teaching certificate and returned to Swift Current. Under her married name, Uher, she taught high-school English. Her first poem was published in Grain in 1974. She then published two collections of poetry—Inside is the sky (1976) and Crow's black joy (1978)—before joining the poet Patrick Lane in 1978 and completing an M.A. in English at the University of Alberta—her thesis being a collection of poems, Humans and other beasts (1980). No longer two people (1979), containing poems by both Uher and Lane, announced their creative and personal partnership and functioned as a turning-point in Crozier's feminist poetics.

Between 1977 and 1982 Crozier taught at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, and co-edited an anthology of Saskatchewan poetry with Gary Hyland (A sudden radiance, 1987)—indications of her commitment to that region's writing community. But just as Crozier's reputation as a Prairie poet was firmly established, she began to move around the country so that Lane, and later she herself, could take up positions as writers in residence. They eventually settled in Saanichton, British Columbia, in 1991, when Crozier took up a full-time faculty position in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Victoria. In 1995 she and Patrick Lane edited a collection of poetry by young writers called Breathing fire.

The weather (1981) was a watershed publication for Crozier. Dedicated to her family, whose name she ‘reclaimed’ and used for this and subsequent collections, it extended the range and tone of Crozier's poetry and displayed her increasing control and versatility. Most notably, although there were glimmers of a characteristically anecdotal voice in Humans and other beasts (as in ‘This one's for you’), what Dennis Lee calls the ‘literate vernacular’ established itself more fully here, as in such poems as ‘Spring Storm 1916’. The garden going on without us (1985), new and selected poems, and her subsequent collection, Angels of flesh, angels of silence (1989), were nominated for a Governor General's Award—which she won for Inventing the hawk (1992). (Crozier's Everything arrives at the light (1995)) includes a sequence of ghazals (a form of Oriental lyric poetry) that had been published in a chapbook, Eyewitness (1993). A saving grace: the collected poems of Mrs. Bentley (1966) is an imaginative and moving evocation of the narrator of Sinclair Ross's As for me and my house.

There is an apparent paradox at the heart of Crozier's oeuvre: although seemingly grounded in daily life, it increasingly gestures towards a world of myth and magic that lies both within and beyond that everyday world. Its central images (bread, hands, light, prairie, and sky), and figures (messenger angel, snake, horse, child, and fisherman), appear at the intersection of these two planes, in garden and prairie settings that are more figurative than earthly. In an ongoing project of feminist remythification, Crozier challenges inherited myths by allowing a silent female character to tell her side of the story. For example, ‘On the seventh day’ (Inventing the hawk) retells the Creation story from the engagingly down-to-earth perspective of God's wife and combines humour with a distinctly feminist frame of reference (crucial to Crozier's aesthetic, and perhaps most apparent in No longer two people). Bitingly funny, as in ‘the sex lives of vegetables’ (a series animating garden vegetables in The garden going on without us) and ‘the penis poems’ (in Angels of flesh), politically engaged (as in the challenge to Pinochet's regime in the Chilean sequence), and evocatively personal (as in the elegiac poems for the speaker's father in Inventing the hawk), Crozier's poetry has been praised for its range of voice, tone, and subject matter, and above all for its craftsmanship, humour, and accessibility.

There is an interesting commentary by Crozier on her own poetics, ‘Searching for the poem’, in Waves 14.1–2 (1985): 82–3.