CROZIER, Lorna

---

Also writes as Lorna Uher. Nationality: Canadian. Born: Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 24 May 1948. Education: University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, B.A. 1969; University of Alberta, Edmonton, M.A. 1980. Family: Lives with the poet Patrick Lane, q.v.Career: High school English teacher, Glaslyn, Saskatchewan, 1970–72, and Swift Current, 1972–77; creative writing teacher, Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, Fort San, 1977–81; writer-in-residence, Cypress Hills Community College, Swift Current, 1980–81, Regina Public Library, Saskatchewan, 1984–85, and University of Toronto, 1989–90; director of communications, Saskatchewan Department of Parks, Culture, and Recreation, Regina, 1981–83; broadcaster and writer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, 1986; guest instructor, Banff School of Fine Arts, Alberta, 1986, 1987; special lecturer, University of Saskatchewan, 1986–91. Associate professor, 1991–97, and since 1997 professor, University of Victoria, Canada. Vice president, Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, 1977–79; committee president, Saskatchewan Artists' Colony, 1982–84. Awards: CBC prize, 1987; Governor General's award for poetry, 1992; Canadian Author's award for poetry, 1992; The League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther award, 1992; National Magazine Gold Medal award for poetry, 1996; Mothertongue Chapbook winner, 1996, for The Transparency of Grief. Address: c/o McClelland and Stewart Inc., 481 University Avenue, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5G 2E9, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Inside Is the Sky (as Lorna Uher). Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Thistledown Press, 1976.

Crow's Black Joy (as Lorna Uher). Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1978.

No Longer Two People (as Lorna Uher), with Patrick Lane. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Turnstone Press, 1979.

Animals of Fall (as Lorna Uher). Vancouver, Very Stone House, 1979.

Humans and Other Beasts (as Lorna Uher). Winnipeg, Manitoba, Turnstone Press, 1980.

The Weather. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Coteau, 1983.

The Garden Going On without Us. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1988.

Inventing the Hawk. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1992.

Everything Arrives at the Light. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1995.

The Transparency of Grief. Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Other Tongue Press, 1996.

A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1996.

What the Living Won't Let Go. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1999.

Play

If We Call This the Girlie Show, Will You Find It Offensive, with Rex Deverel, Denise Ball, and David Miller (produced Regina, 1984).

Other

Editor, with Gary Hyland, A Sudden Radiance: Saskatchewan Poetry. Regina, Saskatchewan, Coteau, 1987.

Editor, with Patrick Lane, Breathing Fire: The New Generation of Canadian Poets, Pender Harbour, British Columbia, Harbour Publishers, 1995.

Editor, with Patrick Lane, The Selected Poems of Alden Nowlan. Toronto, Anansi, 1995.

*

Critical Studies: Interview by Doris Hillis, in Prairie Fire, 6(3), summer 1985; by Nathalie Cooke, in Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker and others, Toronto, ECW, 1995; "Phoenix from the Ashes: Lorna Crozier and Margaret Avison" by Deborah Bowen, in Canadian Poetry, 40, spring-summer 1997.

*  *  *

Since her emergence from the so-called Moose Jaw movement in the mid-1970s, Lorna Crozier has earned a significant place in Canadian poetry, not only for the penetrating wit of her poetry and impressive command of satirical skills but also for the depth of perception and feeling she infuses into her work. In later books such as The Weather, The Garden Going On without Us, and Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, Crozier has become a spokesperson for the feminist heterosexual woman, a keen observer not only of the consequences of relationships but also of their dynamics and an apologist for desire, love, and caring.

Crozier is not the typical prairie poet. Her terrain, aside from the use of her native Saskatchewan landscape as a backdrop for poems such as "The Photograph I Keep of Them" in The Garden Going On without Us, is the realm of metaphysics and the metaphysical complexities of time, place, history, thought, and emotions:

   Behind them the prairies
   tells its spare story of drought.
 
 
   They tell no stories.
   Not how they feel
   about one another
   or the strange landscape
   that makes them small.
 
 
   I can write down only this
   for sure:
   they have left the farm
   they are going somewhere.

Poems such as "The Women Who Survive" and "My Aunt's Ghost" are written in the voice of a small-town Saskatchewan woman, an effort on Crozier's part that reflects a growing movement in Canadian poetry away from a purely physical depiction of external landscape to a more intimate, psychological, and internalized recreation of the voices that inhabit both the inner and outer worlds. As she once noted in an interview, her poems arise out of an "emotional response to what is going on in the world … filtered through my way of seeing things."

Crozier examines her subjects with the intricacy of a "freeze-frame philosopher" who has forsaken pure reason for the culs-de-sac of possibility, political points, and verity of truth through feeling, as in "A Poem about Nothing" in The Garden Going On without Us:

   When the Cree chiefs
   signed the treaties on the plains
   they wrote X
   beside their names.
 
 
   In English, X equals zero.

While still political in its tone and preoccupation—whether in the sense of sexual politics or, as in the case of "A Poem about Nothing," in the traditional sense—Crozier's work has become more playful. In her later writing she has shown a marked movement away from the dark overtones of her earlier books, when she shared many of the solemn concerns and motivations found in Margaret Atwood's verse. In retrospect the change seems to have taken place with publication of her pivotal No Longer Two People, a volume of dialogues between a male and a female poetic anima that she coauthored with Patrick Lane. The book, the result of a reconciliation after a disagreement, took its title from a quote by Picasso: "They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colours; forms and colours that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibration of life." No Longer Two People, which was unjustly maligned by critics when it appeared, has taken on an important role in Crozier's canon for two reasons. First, it shifted the focus of her work onto the details of the male-female relationship and allowed her to redefine her own femininity and her partner's masculinity within that context, and, second, it brought to her work an idea of "metamorphosis," which has become a key element in her later collections.

"The Penis Poems" in Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, for example, or "The Sex Lives of Vegetables" in The Garden Going On without Us are sequences of poems that approach human sexuality with a partially satirical, partially magical sense of wit and metamorphosis. In "The Penis Poems" the male phallus is subjected to a range of speculative possibilities, some historical, some sensual, some mythical, and all humorous. To accomplish this, Crozier has taken up the poetic sequence as her forte, and, as in "The Foetus Dreams" in The Garden Going On without Us, she explores her subjects by "taking more than one look at something." In this sense Crozier is a refreshingly cinematic poet who offers different angles and variations on the same subject, the same theme, without cumbersome repetition. For her, poetry is not a linear experience but a range of experiences, just as her perception of the prairie, the landscape of her psychological orientation, is not linear or even infinitely horizontal but rather multidimensional, metaphysical, and playfully pliable.

Mythology, both as a literary source and as a model for metamorphosis, has become increasingly important to her work as it represents the impossible within the realm of the possible. Whether she is writing about Icarus or penises, classical mythology or personal biography, the sheer delight that comes from a playful transformation is one of the rewards of Crozier's work. The need to transform, in essence the need to mythologize, to identify and re-create wonder, is at the core of her work, so that her poems ultimately are retellings of known stories, accepted facts, and plotable landscapes. In "Icarus in the Sea" from Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, she concludes,

   He is what moves under
   green shadows in prairie sloughs,
   what nests in blue
   reflections in mountain lakes …
 
 
   Icarus of sky and water,
   you who know the paths of birds
   and spawning fish,
   we will think of you
   as the one we cannot catch,
   the one that keeps us
   dreaming, the broken
   line, the
   Ah!

The same sense of wonder, of making old things new, is extended in Crozier's work to the realm of the domestic, where small everyday objects and tasks are scrutinized with a warmth and sensitivity that lift them above the level of the merely mundane. In the found poem "Dreaming Domestic," in Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, commonplace dreams are elevated by the sense of possibilities they foretell for the women who dream them:

   A young woman dreaming of eating pickles
   foretells an unambitious career.
   If she dreams of basting meats
   she will determine her expectations
   by folly and selfishness.

Crozier's images are those of the concrete rather than the abstract world, the temporal rather than the extemporal. When she allows herself excursions into the biography of others, as in such Russianinfluenced poems as "Pavlova" and "Nijinsky" in The Garden Going On without Us, it is to explore the details of the everyday lives of her subjects, which in turn humanizes them. It is this sense of humanizing the subject, of making the real more real by making it magical and believable, that gives Crozier's work its life.

—Bruce Meyer