Inventing the Hawk

Anne Burke is the editor of the Prairie Journal Press.

In the title poem of this collection, which was awarded a 1992 Governor
General’s Literary Award, the poet is the hawk but also its prey. She
is the food of gophers and mice and the germination of seeds, “the
radiant, uninvented blades of grass.” It is “in the patient telling
/ of her body” that writing occurs.

The heart and soul of this collection are the poems that explore the
relationships between the sexes, from the iconography of the horse to
lovemaking “that will take him in”; from the plain language of
“Living Day By Day” to the holographic “Waiting For A Sign.”
There are, too, the phallus of tongue or snake; men’s violence against
women; the man as artist and woman as his model.

Here we discover “The Gardens Within Us,” naturally following from
Crozier’s The Gardens Going On Without Us (1985). There is even the
crow of Crow’s Black Joy (1979) and more humor in “Why I Love
Pumpkins.” Crozier, the consummate artist, is also a dreamer, who
often writes from that half-world between waking and sleep. Metaphysical
conceits, images, and metaphors “are there in life,” as she said in
a 1988 interview. The landscape in her poems is more an internal
landscape than an external one, whether it is “that thin spit of earth
/ under that huge prairie sky” or the postlapsarian garden in which
“all that is wild / has gone.”

A keynote piece is “Facts About My Father,” dedicated to Emerson
Crozier. With the companion piece “Repetitions For My Mother,” it is
framed by other poems to flesh out the family portraits. The poet is
discovering and re-creating family secrets with adroitness and grace.
She moves effortlessly from prose poem to lyric, and she has her
fictionalized heroes: Hemingway, Albert Magnus, Plato, Homer, Pavlova,
and others. The child learning language is a poet hungry for words in
“Moving Toward Speech.” The reader’s appetite is whetted for more
of Crozier’s skill and brilliance.