The poems in this haunting new book are both playful and provocative, witty and intimate. Central to the collection is a powerful elegy for her 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 perspective 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 aspects of ourselves. This is poetry that will change the way we look at our lives.

Lorna Crozier’s radical imagination, and the finely tuned emotional intelligence that is revealed in the clarity of her poetry, have made her one of Canada’s most popular poets. Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected and introduced by Catherine Hunter, and includes an afterword by Crozier herself. Representing her work from 1985 to 2002, the collection reveals the wide range of Lorna Crozier’s voice in its most lyrical, contemplative, ironic, and witty moments. Hunter’s introduction discusses the poet’s major themes, with particular attention to her feminist approach to biblical myth and her fascination with absence and silence as sites for imaginative revision. Crozier’s afterword, “See How Many Ends This Stick Has: A Reflection on Poetry,” 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 tantalized by what predates speaking and all that cant be named. An engaging volume that will appeal to undergraduate students as well as general readers of poetry. Lorna Crozier’s work has won many awards, including the Governor Generals Award in 1992 (for Inventing the Hawk), the first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1992, a National Magazine Award in 1995, and two Pat Lowther Memorial Awards (1993 and 1996) for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently, Whetstone. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria.

"A testament to the miraculous beings that share our planet, The Wild in You is a creative collaboration between a lauded nature photographer and an internationally renowned poet. Inspired by the majestic and savage beauty of a place where forest and sea meet, Ian McAllister's photographs and Lorna Crozier's poetry come together to translate the fierce emotion of the wilderness into the language of the human heart. Featuring over thirty beautiful full-size photographs of wolves, bears, sea lions, jellyfish, and other wild creatures paired with original poems, The Wild in You challenges the reader to a deeper understanding of the connection between humans, animals, and our earth." -- Book jacket

The Garden Going On Without Usis Lorna Crozier's sixth collection of poems, and is a book of rare virtuosity. Her poetry is sensual, pragmatic, linked to the women and men about her – people who live rather than simply name their lives. She often writes about the 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. Her keen ironic tone is balanced by a certain romanticism. As a lyric poet, she has a wide range of tone and style.

Traditional approaches to Prairie literature have focussed on the significance of "the land" in attempts to make a place into a home. The emphasis on the importance of landscape as a defining feature ignores the important roles played by other influences brought to the land such as history, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, community, family, and occupation. Deborah Keahey considers over 70 years of Canadian Prairie literature, including poetry, autobiography, drama, and fiction. The 17 writers range from the well-established, like Martha Ostenso and Robert Kroetsch, to newer writers, like Ian Ross and Kelly Rebar. Through their works, she asks whether the Prairies are a physical or a political creation, whether "home" is made by what you bring with you, or what you find when you arrive, and she incorporates the influences and effects far beyond landscape to understand what guides the "home-making" process of both the writers and their creations. Her study acknowledges that "home" is a complicated concept, and making a place into a home place is a complicated process. Informed by current linguistic, feminist, postcolonial, and cultural theory, Keahey explores these concepts in depth and redefines our understanding of place, home, and the relationship between them.

The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising. How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen? The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn't know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting. What life-affirming questions have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so profound, original and lively, and also so much fun?

A historian's call to make the celebration of America's past more honest.