{"product_id":"whetstone-isbn-9780771024672","title":"Whetstone","description":"National-award-winning poet Lorna Crozier’s new collection of poems are peopled by the seasons and their elements, her beloved prairies, sorrow, joy, and the dead. Central to their themes are revisitations of family and marriage, and the land-death that is drought. Universal, deeply moving, crowded with breathtaking imagery, these are darkly resonant poems of middle age: alert to the beauty in loss, cherishing the humanity that is whetted on that stone. This is Lorna Crozier, one of Canada’s most highly celebrated poets, at the top of her form.“Breathtakingly down-to-earth and reassuringly lyrical, new poems by Lorna Crozier  are always a reason for rejoicing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[She has the] ability to create  poems in which almost impossibly delicate, sharply focused imagery evokes emotional  vastness.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Vancouver Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “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. She continues to provide these things.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Books in Canada\u003c\/i\u003eLORNA CROZIER is the author of the memoir \u003ci\u003eThrough the Garden\u003c\/i\u003e, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and a \u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e 100 Best Book. She has published eighteen books of poetry, including\u003ci\u003e God of Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWhat the Soul Doesn't Want\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Wrong Cat\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSmall Mechanics\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eWhetstone\u003c\/i\u003e. She is also the author of\u003ci\u003e The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things \u003c\/i\u003eand the memoir \u003ci\u003eSmall Beneath the Sky\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the Hubert Evans Award for Creative Nonfiction. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for\u003ci\u003e Inventing the Hawk \u003c\/i\u003eand 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.BLIZZARD \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalking into wind, I lean into my mother's muskrat coat;\u003cbr\u003earound the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf we stood still we'd disappear. There's no up or down,\u003cbr\u003eno houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand what's inside us. When we get home my father\u003cbr\u003ewill be there or not. No one ever looks for us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI could lie down and stay right here where snow is all\u003cbr\u003ethat happens, and silence isn't loneliness just cold\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003enot talking. My mother tugs at me and won't let go.\u003cbr\u003eThen stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewe don't know if anyone will understand\u003cbr\u003ethe tongue we speak, so far we are from home. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Word About the Poem\u003c\/b\u003e By Lorna Crozier \u003cbr\u003eBlizzards, at least the kind we have on the prairies, can be terrifying events, especially if you are caught in one on the highway, but I love walking in them. Everything else gets shut out. You can see almost nothing in front of you or on either side, just a shifting white that falls and falls until the hood of your jacket, your shoulders, even your eyebrows and lashes are feathered with snow. There is no more enclosed, magical space than what a blizzard can take you into. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was thinking about my mother, and how our relationships with our mothers are the most primal relationships we have. We started out alone with our mothers, in the womb, and we got to know them inside them, internally. We grew our bones and our hearts inside our mothers. I was thinking of how that kind of intense closeness keeps going through your life, and I thought of the metaphoric surround of a blizzard. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen my mother and I walked home in a blizzard when I was a child, we were the only two people in the whole world. It was as if we had fallen into one of those glass snow globes, and all we had was each other, the snow, time collapsing on itself, and the private silent language of mother and child making their way back home. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eHow the Poem Works \u003c\/b\u003eBy Jan Zwicky \u003cbr\u003eThings to notice about the poem: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1. The first line, the first three words: the rhythm is trochaic: \u003ci\u003eWalk\u003c\/i\u003eing \u003ci\u003ein\u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003ewind\u003c\/i\u003e. The emphasis, combined with the alliteration on the smooth consonant “w,” enacts the steady effortful push of trying to make headway. (The rest of the lines are predominantly iambic.) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2. The stanza break after the fourth line: the grammar gives the line great internal unity - we could put a full stop after \"wind\" and the sentence would make sense. So, when instead of a full stop we get the lift into emptiness of an unpunctuated stanza break, the effect is of momentary vertigo - which is then articulated in the opening words of the third stanza: there are only two sources of noise in this universe, the exterior wind and the interior clamour. Clamour about what? - And the moment we ask this question, the father appears. In the sixth line, immediately following, the phrase \"will be there or not\" is one of the least heavily accented in the poem, the closest to prose we get. Here is the hard truth, spoken as plainly as possible: the father is unpredictable, and he doesn't care. \"No one ever looks for us.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3. Notice that the speaker never says she's in pain. She simply sets the observation of the interior clamour, of the fact that no one ever looks for her or her mother, beside the seduction of giving up, of lying down in the snow and silence and going no further. But the mother won't let her. And in accepting that gesture, the speaker acknowledges an alliance - that in the pain and confusion, the white-out of their domestic life, the mother and child are known to one another. They don't speak, they just keep going - and this one gesture, of keeping going, is tantamount to a world of communication, the only thing that \u003ci\u003ecan\u003c\/i\u003e be said.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303577178341,"sku":"NP9780771024672","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771024672.jpg?v=1767744096","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/whetstone-isbn-9780771024672","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}