The Blue Hour of the Day.

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

In The Blue Hour of the Day, Lorna Crozier provides a satisfying selection of her work between 1985 and 2005. Each of the eight sections in this text reflects the titles of all her poetry collections in that period except for Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003). Consequently, these eight sections are entitled “The Garden Going On Without Us,” “Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence,” “Inventing the Hawk,” “Everything Arrives at the Light,” “A Saving Grace,” “What the Living Won’t Let Go,” “Apocrypha of Light,” and “Whetstone.” The title of this selection comes from Crozier’s poem “Shadow” in Whetstone (2005). Crozier writes, “To be blue / simply because snow has fallen / and it’s the blue hour of the day.” Crozier’s collection is representative of her small-town prairie roots, her love for nature, her fascination with light and darkness, her compassion for and elevation of the “fallen,” and her search of and faith in the transcendent/angelic. Her tone is down to earth, her language is rooted, her imagery is accessible, and her content is familiar. Yet Crozier is very capable of producing surprise, provoking laughter or chagrin, and personalizing the other. She tells the unspoken stories of abused/bullied children, wild adolescents, marginalized women, dysfunctional and dear family members, rural neighbours, faithful and unfaithful lovers, disparate body parts (including their body odour in “Their Smell”), various animals, several vegetables, garden gloves, two poems, an artistic subject (“the man in the Colville painting” in “The Pacific”), and mythological/fictional/historical characters such as Georgia O’Keefe, Sigmund Freud, Osiris, Isis, God, Noah’s wife, characters in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House, Thomas Hardy, Sarah (Abraham’s wife), the serpent in Eden, and Louis Armstrong. She speaks grace into and sheds light onto every stage of life from birth (including conception and pregnancy) to death (from cancer/suicide) and from love to loss. She is unafraid to explore the loss of innocence in all its rawness and idealism in order to probe the capacity of or desirability for “redemption.” Her spirituality is anchored in concrete reality; her honesty is grounded in hope, and her love for people and the land is palpable.