Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier, poet (born at Swift Current, SK 24 May 1948). Lorna Crozier was raised in Swift Current and educated at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Alberta (MA 1980). She taught English in high school before she began publishing her poetry. Crozier has served as writer-in-residence at universities across the country and teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. Human relationships, the natural world, language, memory and perception are themes central to her body of work. In many poems, Crozier's descriptions of the prairie landscape and its seasons shift into metaphysical meditations.

Lorna Crozier's first 2 books, Inside Is the Sky (1976) and Crow's Black Joy (1978), investigate conditions of the divided self and explore the power politics of male-female relations. Her feminist politics are similarly expressed in the humorous sequences in The Garden Going on Without Us (1985) and Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988). These books and her more recent works re-vision traditional myths and histories.

Inventing the Hawk (1992), which won the Governor General's Award, includes an elegiac sequence for the poet's father. A prolific writer, Lorna Crozier also published Eye Witness (1993), Everything Arrives at the Light (1995) and What the Living Won't Let Go in the 1990s. A Saving Grace (1996) is a sequence of poems written in the voice of Mrs. Bentley, the narrator of Sinclair Ross's 1941 novel As for Me and My House.

Since 1978 Lorna Crozier has lived with poet Patrick Lane, with whom she has co-authored a book of poems, No Longer Two People (1979). Crozier and Lane co-edited Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets (1994) and Breathing Fire 2 (2004). Crozier's other editorial work includes Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems (1996) and the non-fiction essay collection, Desire in Seven Voices (1999). Crozier and Lane also co-edited the anthology Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (2006). In 2009 Crozier's memoir of her early life, Small Beneath the Sky, was published to much acclaim for its evocations of place, and its wisdom and humour.

Lorna Crozier's technical craftsmanship is on display in 2002's Apocrypha of Light and her 2003 Bones in the Wings, which is a collection of ghazals, an ancient type of lyric poetry based on couplets. 2005's collection Whetstone, too, links careful crafting with subject matter attentive to the wash of human emotion and sensory being. Crozier's best poems have been collected in the volumes Before the First Word (2005) and The Blue Hour of the Day (2007).

Lorna Crozier has been awarded many of Canada's highest distinctions for her poetry: in addition to the Governor General's Award for Poetry she has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, two Pat Lowther Awards (1993, 1996), the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2000), and won the CBC national writing competition. Crozier was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009 and an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2011 for her poetry and "her mentorship of the next generation of Canadian poets."