Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier

Lynn R. Szabo is chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

This fine volume collects 35 of Crozier’s most representative and
best-known poems from 1980 to 2002, bound with the cover image,
“Growing Fiery Wings” by renowned Canadian artist, Erica Grimm
Vance. Neil Besner, general editor of the WLU Press, states in his
foreword that the volume’s purpose is to offer “readers in and out
of classrooms ... a more useful, engaging, and comprehensive
introduction to [the] poet’s work.” In this it cannot fail, due in
part to Catherine Hunter’s judicious selection and well-crafted
introduction to the work of this award-winning poet.

The most pleasing distinctive of this volume is its afterword offering
the poet’s own treatise on her aesthetics and poetics, which she
claims are often grounded in “resistance”—a site of poetic
attentiveness where she “bargains ... with the world to persuade the
words to walk out of the shadows where their lairs are.” For Crozier,
that sacred place may be “on the border between silence and being”;
in the gap between one’s appearance and another’s perception of it;
in the space between the image and the “image finding its way into
words”; in the manner in which a poet “hon[ours] all that is outside
the self.”

By the power that Crozier’s poetic voice produces, the wounded
creature, the abused and her forgiven abuser, and even her own imagined
child are all suffused with a maternality grounded in her female
capacity for unconditional love. That female power also overrides the
agency of God when it revises Judeo-Christian mythology and “hands
power over to a woman,” in Hunter’s words. The poems drawn from Mrs.
Bentley’s character (As for Me and My House) repaint her subversive
feminism in a “loving homage” to Ross’s own portraiture. The
mysterious intimacies chronicling Crozier’s love story with Patrick
Lane and the grand love affair she has with the prairie skies of her
birthplace are compounded with the ordinariness of daily life, in poetry
that satisfies but does not satiate, ever arousing in the reader the
want for more.