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    Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier
    Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier
    Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier

    By Lorna Crozier

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    About this ebook

    Lorna Crozier’s radical imagination, and the finely tuned emotional intelligence that is revealed in the clarity of her poetry, have made her one of Canada’s most popular poets. Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected and introduced by Catherine Hunter, and includes an afterword by Crozier herself. Representing her work from 1985 to 2002, the collection reveals the wide range of Lorna Crozier’s voice in its most lyrical, contemplative, ironic, and witty moments. Hunter’s introduction discusses the poet’s major themes, with particular attention to her feminist approach to biblical myth and her fascination with absence and silence as sites for imaginative revision. Crozier’s afterword, “See How Many Ends This Stick Has: A Reflection on Poetry,” is a lyrical meditation that provides an inspirational glimpse into the philosophy of a writer who prizes the intensity of awareness that poetry demands, and is tantalized by what predates speaking and all that cant be named. An engaging volume that will appeal to undergraduate students as well as general readers of poetry.

    Lorna Crozier’s work has won many awards, including the Governor Generals Award in 1992 (for Inventing the Hawk), the first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1992, a National Magazine Award in 1995, and two Pat Lowther Memorial Awards (1993 and 1996) for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently, Whetstone. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateSep 21, 2005
    ISBN9781554587117
    Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier
    Author

    Lorna Crozier

    Lorna Crozier, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, most recently The Wrong Cat and The Wild in You. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Ordinary Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, has been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and is a three-time recipient of the Pat Lowther Award. Born in Swift Current, she now lives on Vancouver Island with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats.

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      Book preview

      Before the First Word - Lorna Crozier

      Before the First Word

      The Poetry of Lorna Crozier

      Before the First Word

      The Poetry of Lorna Crozier

      Selected with an introduction by

      Catherine Hunter and an afterword by Lorna Crozier

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Crozier, Lorna, 1948–

      Before the first word : the poetry of Lorna Crozier / selected, with an introduction by Catherine Hunter ; and an afterword by Lorna Crozier.

      (Laurier poetry series)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 0-88920-489-6

      I. Hunter, Catherine, 1957–       II. Title.     III. Series.

      PS8555.R72A6 2005                        C811’.54                            C2005-904701-1

      © 2005 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Cover image: Erica Grimm Vance. Growing fiery Wings, 1998. Encaustic, steel, and gold, 35 x 45. The artist’s work can be seen at www.egrimmvance.com

      Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      Printed in Canada

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Table of Contents

      Foreword, Neil Besner

      Biographical Note

      Introduction, Catherine Hunter

      Still-Life

      Poem about Nothing

      This Is a Love Poem without Restraint

      The Child Who Walks Backwards

      Carrots

      Onions

      Fear of Snakes

      Quitting Smoking

      The Goldberg Variations

      Home Town

      Male Thrust

      Mother and I, Walking

      How to Stop Missing Your Friend Who Died

      On the Seventh Day

      Living Day by Day

      Angel of Bees

      Canada Day Parade

      The Dark Ages of the Sea

      The Red Onion in Skagway, Alaska

      The Wild Boys

      The Garden at Night

      Going Back

      Dust

      The Kind of Woman

      Not the Music

      Mrs. Bentley

      Packing for the Future: Instructions

      Watching My Lover

      What You Remember Remains

      A Kind of Love

      Wildflowers

      The Origin of the Species

      What the Snake Brings to the World

      Original Sin: 1. The first Woman

      2. The Fall of Eve

      The Sacrifice of Isaac

      Afterword: See How Many Ends This Stick Has, by Lorna Crozier

      Acknowledgements

      Foreword

      At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.

      But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.

      The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.

      Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.

      It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners: but they had their being once /and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are

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