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The Blue Hour of the Day

Selected Poems

by (author) Lorna Crozier

Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Initial publish date
Apr 2007
Subjects
Canadian, Women Authors, General
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Description

Over the course of a career spanning three decades, Lorna Crozier has become one of Canada’s most beloved poets, receiving high acclaim and numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award. Now, 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.

About the author

Lorna Crozier, one of Canada's most celebrated poets, has read from her work on every continent. She has received numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, for her fifteen books of poetry, which include The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems; Whetstone; Apocrypha of Light; What the Living Won't Let Go; A Saving Grace; Everything Arrives at the Light; Inventing the Hawk; Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence; and The Garden Going On Without Us. She has also edited several anthologies, among them Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. She lives in Saanich, BC.

Lorna Crozier's profile page

Excerpt: The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems (by (author) Lorna Crozier)

ONIONS
The onion loves the onion.
It hugs its many layers,
saying O, O, O,
each vowel smaller
than the last.

Some say it has no heart.
It doesn’t need one.
It surrounds itself,
feels whole. Primordial.
First among vegetables.

If Eve had bitten it
instead of the apple,
how different
Paradise.

Editorial Reviews

"What a joy to have a volume of selected poems by this marvelous Canadian poet, storyteller, truth-teller, visionary."
—Ursula K Le Guin, New York Times Book Review

“One of the most original poets alive.”
Books in Canada

“Crozier’s fans have come to expect graceful clarity, sly humour, a strong affinity for the animal world and a subversive feminist tilt to the mirror she holds up to human affairs.”
Toronto Star
“Lorna Crozier’s The Blue Hour of the Day reads like one long autobiographical poem of astonishing coherence and beauty, and so powerful that, after I’d closed the book, I found that I’d unwittingly learnt several of the lines by heart.”
—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year