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?
RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD LONGLIST CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
“God of Shadows is sure to please the god of books.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Lorna Crozier provides us with an extraordinary, spirit-saturated world in this book. It’s all worked out within a teasing intimacy with things that is full of sly praising. Cats, balconies, things without merit, the state of astonishment—she knows them and they look back at her. She grasps their beauty, fidelity, and genius. There is such fun here, such compassion and sorrow. How much we owe to Crozier’s wit and probing gaze.” —Tim Lilburn
“All good poets notice things. But Crozier cares—she cares personally—about what she notices; and her special gift is her sense for the caring that arises in other things. Recklessly exuberant, acute and pensive by turns, these new poems exhibit Crozier’s signature interest in the world’s odd-angled and gawky glory. How it shines in the cloudless, wide gaze of her heart.” —Jan Zwicky
LORNA CROZIER is the author of the memoir Through the Garden, which was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. She has published eighteen books of poetry, including God of Shadows, What the Soul Doesn’t Want, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of the memoir Small Beneath the Sky, which won the Hubert Evans Award for Creative Nonfiction. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Inventing the Hawk and three additional collections were finalists for this award. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She was awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received five honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian literature. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia.
View titles by Lorna Crozier
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?
Reviews
RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD LONGLIST CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
“God of Shadows is sure to please the god of books.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Lorna Crozier provides us with an extraordinary, spirit-saturated world in this book. It’s all worked out within a teasing intimacy with things that is full of sly praising. Cats, balconies, things without merit, the state of astonishment—she knows them and they look back at her. She grasps their beauty, fidelity, and genius. There is such fun here, such compassion and sorrow. How much we owe to Crozier’s wit and probing gaze.” —Tim Lilburn
“All good poets notice things. But Crozier cares—she cares personally—about what she notices; and her special gift is her sense for the caring that arises in other things. Recklessly exuberant, acute and pensive by turns, these new poems exhibit Crozier’s signature interest in the world’s odd-angled and gawky glory. How it shines in the cloudless, wide gaze of her heart.” —Jan Zwicky
LORNA CROZIER is the author of the memoir Through the Garden, which was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. She has published eighteen books of poetry, including God of Shadows, What the Soul Doesn’t Want, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of the memoir Small Beneath the Sky, which won the Hubert Evans Award for Creative Nonfiction. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Inventing the Hawk and three additional collections were finalists for this award. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She was awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received five honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian literature. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia.
View titles by Lorna Crozier