Lorna Crozier

Place and year of birth: Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 1948

Crozier breaks with age stereotypes based on the decline of the body and mind through humor and love, balancing the perceptions of ageing.

In her poems, Crozier describes the ageing process in all its complexity, from the fear of looking in the mirror because of the bodily changes that age brings, to the anguish over a sick husband and future widowhood.

Crozier's late work incorporates reflections on death and the loss of loved ones, contrasted by a strong need to fight to move on.

The fact that Crozier has published more than ever since her retirement, at the rate of one to two volumes of poetry a year, indicates great creativity in her seventh decade of life.

QUOTES:

• Who wants to know when we get it going / we're revved up, like the first time- honest- / like the first time, if only we could remember it, our old bodies doing what you know / bodies do, worn and beautiful and shameless. (“My Last Erotic Poem” Small Mechanics (2011), pp. 77-78)
• My husband is going blind. // Soon no one will say / I am beautiful // in my new dress, / my red shoes. // Or will he say it more often, / old woman that I am, // now that he can’t see? (“Self-Centred,” What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), p. 53)
• For him, I don’t get old. / His fingers, chapped from gardening, sand my skin, / bring out the grain he cannot see. / I am made beautiful by loss. (“When the Bones Get Cold” What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), p. 13)
• She puts check marks by all the blanks on the attendance sheet, / Then stands at the front of an emptiness she can’t see past. / It’s never what you think it’s going to be. / … / Don’t play dead until you die. (“What’s Missing in Heaven” What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), p.54)

COMMUNICATIONS presented to congresses:

• Mina-Riera, Núria. “Late Style and the Experience of Ageing into Old Age in Lorna Crozier’s What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017).” 42nd AEDEAN CONFERENCE. Universidad de Córdoba, 7-9 de noviembre de 2018.
• Mina-Riera, Núria. “Wisdom and Conscious Aging in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry.” 1st INDEST International Conference on Social and Territorial Development. Universidad de Lleida, 23-24 noviembre de 2017.

Articles and books:

• Crozier, Lorna, and Núria Mina Riera. Col·lecció Versos, núm. 63. [Poems translated into Catalan by Núria Mina Riera]. Lleida: Aula de Poesia Jordi Jové of the University of Lleida, 2019

By: Núria Mina Riera nuria.mina@udl.cat