Small Beneath the Sky (2009)
About this memoir Ursula Le Guin wrote, “How rare such honesty is, and how hard-won, and radiant, and beautiful.” Guy Vanderhaeghe further commented, “Lorna Crozier has woven the delicate threads of a particular place, time and family into a powerful, big-hearted, poignant, funny, wise and utterly arresting memoir.”

 
Click pictures
to enlarge

The Blue Hour of the Day (2007)
In this definitive selection of poems, which draws on her eight major collections and includes many of the poems for which she is justly celebrated, Crozier’s trademark investigations of family, spirituality, love’s fierce attachments, and bereavement and loss have been given a new framework. As a sapphire generates a blue light from within, The Blue Hour of the Day demonstrates Crozier’s dazzling capacity to bring depths to light, unfailingly and unflinchingly. It represents the best work of an icon of Canadian poetry.

Before the First Word (2005)
This book is a collection of thirty-five of Crozier's best poems, selected and introduced by Catherine Hunter with an afterword by the poet herself. Representing Crozier's work from 1980 to 2002, this collection reveals the wide range of her voice in its most lyrical, contemplative, ironic, and witty moments.
 
Hunter's introduction discusses the poet's major themes, with particular attention to Crozier's feminist approach to biblical myth and her fascination with absence and silence as sites for imaginative revision. Crozier's afterword is a lyrical meditation that provides an inspirational glimpse into the philosophy of a writer who prizes the intensity of awareness that poetry demands, and is tantilized by "what predates speaking" and "all that can't be named."

Whetstone (2005)
Ever lyric and always abounding with breathtaking imagery, this latest of book of poems explores what is universal to the human experience through deeply personal and humane writing. This is poetry that wrestles with memory, questions the spiritual, and bares its love for language. Crozier beholds the earth’s gifts ­ magpies, cows in moonlight, wind, snow and roses ­ with wonder and gratitude, and writes the landscape of emotion with a magical wisdom of the senses.

Bones in their Wings (2003)
Bones in their Wings is a groundbreaking work by one of the most original and imaginative poets of our time. In there remarkable poems, Lorna Crozier reveals the power of the ghazal to move the reader with insight and spiritual depth. At once open and daring, the verses take the reader through a series of wonderful leaps: from joy to yearning, from bewilderment to surrender, and finally to gratitude.
 
In an afterword, Crozier illuminates the pursuit of the ghazal by some of Canada's greatest poets. This succinct and poetic essay, "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being," chronicles the unlikely but startling rise of the ghazal as an important form in Canadian poetry.

Apocrypha of Light (2002)
In poems that are rooted in elemental truths of land, light, and the human heart, Lorna Crozier offers us startlingly original and profoundly humane revisionings of familiar Biblical figures and events. The compassion and psychological insight that have made her one of Canada's most beloved poets are here in force, shot through with wit and intelligence, rendered in a lithe, tensile line. This is vintage Crozier: tales of beginning and of ending, sharp, sweet, heretical, and deeply true. The remarkable closing sequence, "Book of Praise," was commissioned for broadcast by the CBC, and aired to public acclaim in the spring of 2000.

Desire (1999)
Edited by Lorna Crozier
In this daring, funny, and highly literate collection of personal essays, all published here for the first time, seven of Canada's best writers explore how desire has shaped them-- and how they have shaped desire.

Writers: Dionne Brand, Bonnie Burnard, Lorna Crozier, Evelyn Lau, Shani Mootoo, Susan Musgrave, and Carol Shields.

What the Living Won't Let Go (1999)
While far-reaching in their universal truths, the poems in this collection come together as a compelling narrative. Some follow the lives, from conception to death, of two families: Crozier's own and that of a shadow family, trapped in a darker and unrelenting history. Other poems give advice to the soul, suggest ways to pack for the future, and transport the reader to the spirit world of foxes, "coyote hounds", and the cat who ate Thomas Hardy's heart. Lyrical and tough, humane and wise, these are poems written by a poet who understands the intricate nature of memory and the ways in which we learn to navigate the ephemeral landscape of the present.

A Saving Grace (1996)
Written in 1941, Sinclair Ross's beloved classic As For Me and My House has inspired the imaginations of generations of Canadians. Ross's character Mrs. Bentley remains one of the most complex and controversial figures in Canadian fiction. In this collection, Crozier returns to the mythical town of Horizon, Saskatchewan, during the Dirty Thirties, and, in the voice of a re-imagined Mrs. Bentley, she explores living in that landscpae in a time of loneliness, struggle, and drought. Haunting and evocative, this sequence of poems illuminates the emotional and mystical qualities of the grassland prairies, and the presiding spirits of the land, the elements, and the animals that surround.

Everything Arrives at the Light (1995)
Herer is a community of poems whose words are lit from within, and a home that holds children and adults, the living and the dead. Everything Arrives at the Light is a brilliant gathering of poems with a richly dark seam of terrors, populated with lovers, friends, and relations both difficult and dear. Among its other loves are mimulus, prickly pear, a stallion, "lilacs, literal, and magical," Waskesieu, and carpenter ants in leather aprons. They move with great tenderness through the luminous quotidian, and still deeply respect the shift into myth.

Inventing the Hawk (1992)
The poems in this book are both playful and provocative, witty and intimate. Central to the collection is a powerful elegy for Crozier's father. Beginning with his death, it moves back in time to the author's childhood in a small Saskatchewan community. Inventing the Hawk reveals the small pleasures of day-to-day life, sometimes visited by "angels" who offer a novel, often shocking perspectives on reality. As well, Crozier translates love and the experience of loss into a language resonant with desire and longing-- a language that speaks to the most private rooms of the soul.

Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988)
This seventh book of poetry reinforces Crozier's stature as one of the most prolific poets of our time. Her poems are witty and assuming, yet intimate and provocative. Through her extraordinary vision, Crozier writes into existence a world that is both distinctively familiar to all her readers. These are poems of mourning and celebration, of poignancy and good humour, and they demonstrate why Lorna Crozier lays claim on both the head and the heart.

The Garden Going On Without Us (1985)
A book of rare virtuosity, this collection is sensual, pragmatic, linked to women and men, and the lives they inhabit. These poems take us through the poet's Prairies-- a vast land that bleaches human and animal bones alike, but one that contains gardens in which people and plants are cultivated, and houses which are places of love-making, warmth, and rage. Crozier's keen ironic tone is balanced by deft romanticism that displays her lyric intuition and versatility.

Selected Anthologies

Open Field (2005)
Edited by Sina Queyras
An unparalleled compilation of more than twenty-five innovative poets, selected from the dazzling panorama of contemporary Canadian verse.
 
Included here are Christian Bök, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré, whose experiments with genre have landed them international acclaim; Lisa Robertson and Ken Babstock, whose explorations of the pastoral and the sonnet, respectively, reach as far back into poetry's history as they do into the future of those forms; George Eliot Clark, whose striking lyrics have been adapted for opera; and Tim Lilburn, Don McKay and Jan Zwicky, who have reinvented some of poetry's primordial components from the wilder fringes of the Canadian landscape.
 
Along with Nicole Brossard, Dionne Brand, Lorna Crozier, Christopher Dewdney, Susan Goyette, Dennis Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Fred Wah, and others, these poets have been carefully chosen to convey the exhilarating commotion and diversity of Canadian verse. For native readers, Open Field represents a handy selection of some of their country's most vibrant writers, both established and emergent; for readers in the United States and elsewhere, it is the perfect introduction to the skill and daring ubiquitous in Canadian poetry today.

The Great Cat (2005)
Edited by Emily Fragos
Herewith a litter of tributes to the ever-fascinating, ever-mystifying cat. In this anthology poets across the continents and the centuries describe felines doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves.
 
The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

Poetry International (2003)
Edited by Fred Moramarco
This special double issue of Poetry International was put together by editors throughout the world in order to collect, for the first time, an international sampling of post-colonial English language poetry. It used to be said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire," but though that Empire is long history, the 21st Century version of that adage is that "the sun never sets on English language speakers in the world." The legacy of that Empire has been the exportation of the language of the British Isles throughout the world, and poets in countries as diverse as Singapore and Ghana have adopted it as their own.

15 Canadian Poets x 3 (2001)
Edited by Gary Geddes
15 Canadian Poets x 3, the fourth edition of this highly successful anthology of Canadian poetry, retains all of the poets included in the previous edition, although their selections have been carefully reconsidered. It also adds 15 news poets, among them Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Louise Bernice Halfe, Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Fred Wah, and Jan Zwicky. Each poet is represented by a substantial selection, which will allow teachers and students a greater range of choice. Expanded headnotes outline the life and work of each poet.

20th-Century Poety & Poetics (1996)
Edited by Gary Geddes
This gathering of poems, notes, and poetics materials, offering an in-depth portrait of fifty-nine poets whose work illustrates the major directions of poetry in English in the century, justifies the reputation of 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics as 'a great critical achievement' (Eli Mandel) and as Canada's most widely-used poetry anthology.