Lorna Crozier

Margaret Laurence once called Lorna Crozier "a poet to be grateful for." Here at Northwest Passages, we couldn't agree more and that is why we have made Ms. Crozier our feature author for December and January. The author of fifteen volumes of poetry, including the Governor General's Award winner Inventing the Hawk (1992), Lorna Crozier writes poetry that reaches far beyond the prairies which have helped to inspire much of her work. What makes her poetry remarkable, in fact, is how her keen observation of people and things and her deep connection to specific places and spaces allows her work to move from the particular to the universal in such a way that her work becomes much more than "prairie poetry." The lyricism, passion and, at times, humour of her poems have helped to make Lorna Crozier one of Canada's favourite poets.

Born in 1948, Lorna Crozier grew up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. After high school, she attended the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and earned a BA in 1969. There, she married a high school teacher and they returned to her home town and settled on some land just south of the city. Having obtained a teaching certificate herself, Crozier began teaching English at a local high school and by 1974 had a poem published in the literary journal, Grain. After coming into contact with other like-minded Saskatchewan writers, she helped to found a monthly writing workshop that the participants somewhat jokingly named The Moose Jaw Movement.

The late 1970s was a productive period for Crozier. In 1976, under her married name of Lorna Uher, she published the collection Inside Is the Sky, and this was followed in 1978 by Crow's Black Joy. By that same year, Crozier's marriage had broken up and she began a relationship with the poet Patrick Lane. Their romantic partnership also turned into a creative one and in 1979 they published a collection entitled No Longer Two People. It was also at this time that she and Lane began to live outside the Prairies as they moved around the country so that he could take writer-in-residence positions at a variety of Canadian universities.

Between 1979 and 1980, Crozier also managed to find the time to complete an MA in creative writing at the University of Alberta, the thesis for which would later be published as the collection of poems entitled Humans and Other Beasts (1980). During these years of much travel, Crozier still returned to Saskatchewan each summer to teach creative writing. Crozier's fifth book of poetry, The Weather, came out in 1981 and was the last of her volumes to be published by a small press (Coteau Books). The Weather was also the first book published under her family name, which she "reclaimed" after having used her married name for all of her previous work. During the ten-year period between 1981 and 1991, Crozier spent much of her time in Saskatchewan working first as the Director of Communications for the provincial government, a position she held for two years, and then as a writer- in-residence and writing instructor at various academic institutions and libraries. Between 1986 and 1991 Crozier also taught courses in creative writing and prairie literature at the University of Saskatchewan. During this time, Crozier co-edited A Sudden Radiance (1987), an important anthology of poetry by Saskatchewan writers, and she published two popular and critically-acclaimed collections of poetry, The Garden Going On Without Us (1983) and Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988), both of which were nominated for the prestigious Governor General's Award for English-language poetry.

The early 1990s marked two significant events in Crozier's life, First, in 1991, she and Lane decided to leave the prairies and move to Vancouver Island so that she could take a job as a professor of creative writing at the University of Victoria. Then, one year later, Crozier won the Governor General's Award for her 1992 book, Inventing the Hawk. If anything, winning the Governor General's Award only helped to confirm what many people already knew, that Lorna Crozier is one of Canada's best and most popular living poets.

Crozier has published six volumes of poetry since winning the Governer General’s Award: Everything Arrives at the Light (1995), A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley (1996), What the Living Won’t Let Go (1999), Apocrypha of Light (2002), Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003), and Whetstone (2005), as well as a chapbook entitled Eyewitness (1993). In 1995 she and Patrick Lane co-edited A Breathing Fire, an anthology of work by young poets. In 2000, she edited a collection of essays entitled Desire in Seven Voices.  The next year, she and Patrick Lane co-edited Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (2001).  In 2004, nine years after the publication of the original Breathing Fire anthology, Crozier and Lane co-edited Breathing Fire 2, which introduced a new generation of Canadian poets to the public eye. 

Most recently, she has written Whetstone (2005), Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier (2005) and The Blue Hour of the Day (2007). Committed to giving back to the literary community of Canada, Lorna Crozier continues to teach creative writing at the University of Victoria and still gives writing workshops around the country.

Books and articles by Lorna Crozier (in chronological order)

• Uher, Lorna. Inside Is the Sky. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1976.
• ---. Crow's Black Sky. Edmonton: NeWest, 1978.
• Lane, Patrick, and Lorna Uher. No Longer Two People. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1979.
• Uher, Lorna. Humans and Other Beasts. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1980.
• Crozier, Lorna. The Weather. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan: Coteau, 1983.
• ---. The Garden Going On Without Us. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985.
• ---. “ for the Poem.” Waves 14.1-2 (1985): 82-3.
• Crozier, Lorna, and Gary Hyland (eds.). A Sudden Radiance: Saskatchewan Poetry. Regina: Coteau, 1987.
• Crozier, Lor