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LornaCROZIER |
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| An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn't Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island. |
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The landscape painter at the artist colony in the country noted for its messianic light, its sparse, hard-to-capture beauty, complains she’s come all this way to paint al fresco, but the mosquitoes have driven her inside, no matter the netting on her hat, her cuffed sleeves and pants, a heavy dose of Deet. They bite through everything. And she tries to snap a picture, a breathy handkerchief of mosquitoes flutters over the lens. What can I do? She moans, trapped in a dull and narrow room, thinking of booking a ticket back to her studio in Vancouver. Paint the mosquitoes, god replies.
From God of Shadows, 2018, |
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The onion loves the onion. It hugs its many layers, saying, O, O, O, each vowel mediumer than the last. Some say it has no heart. It doesn't need one. It surrounds itself, feels whole. Primordial. First among vegetables. If Eve had bitten it instead of the apple, how different Paradise.
From Sex Lives of Vegetables.
You want there to be a separate god for owls, for the barred, the burrowing, the saw whet, the spotted, the great-horned, the barn owl whose gaze draws your gaze to his wide face and you see yourself, pale, uncanny. You want this god to keep the owls from harm so the night will be lavishly feathered. Their wings in flight will row through the waters of your sleep and you’ll sense the dip and rise of them, the sky riddled with eyes. You want this god to instruct them not to scoop a cat into the sky, or a family’s only chicken. You want the slow unrolling of the owls’ vowels to slip into your speaking. So much, so little they have to say. You want the owls’ silence to be this god’s silence, one that doesn’t mean there’s no one there, but a refined and honed attention, a keen listening high above you, and a steady looking down.
From God of Shadows, 2018, |
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These texts are published with the kind authorization of the author. |
