The Blue Hour of the Day

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."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 YearLORNA CROZIER is the author of the memoir Through the Garden, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and a Globe and Mail 100 Best Book. 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 Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and 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 the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. She has received many awards and honours including the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and the BC Lieutenant Governor's 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.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.