Small Mechanics: Poems - Softcover

Crozier, Lorna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771023294 ISBN 13: 9780771023293

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2011

Synopsis

A radiant collection of new poems from one of Canada's most renowned and well-read poets.

The poems in Lorna Crozier's rich and wide-ranging new collection, a modern bestiary and a book of mourning, are both shadowed and illuminated by the passing of time, the small mechanics of the body as it ages, the fine-tuning of what a life becomes when parents and old friends are gone. Brilliantly poised between the mythic and the everyday, the anecdotal and the delicately lyrical, these poems contain the wit, irreverence, and startling imagery for which Crozier is justly celebrated. You’ll find Bach and Dostoevsky, a poem that turns into a dog, a religion founded by cats, and wood rats that dance on shingles. These poems turn over the stones of words and find what lies beneath, reminding us why Lorna Crozier is one of Canada’s most well-read and commanding voices.

About this title

About the Author

LORNA CROZIER is the award-winning author of fifteen previous books of poetry, including Inventing the Hawk, A Saving Grace, and, most recently, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems. She is also the author of a memoir, Small Beneath the Sky, winner of the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize, and the editor of several anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2010 and Desire in Seven Voices, and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets, and Breathing Fire 2. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she teaches at the University of Victoria.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LAST BREATH
Not a living soul about,
except for me and the magpie. I know
if I don’t keep moving, he’ll pluck
the breath from my body, taste it
on his tongue before it slides
down his throat, giving him new prophecies
to speak. He’s the bird Noah didn’t send out,
afraid he’d carry the ark’s complaints to heaven.
Tonight he scallops from the copse of willows
to the power pole, stares down at me. I match him
cry for cry, not knowing what I mean but feeling
good about it, the bird part of my brain lit up.
Coyotes, too, start their music as if the magpie’s
flown in to be the guest conductor
for the length of time it takes the sun to sink.
He flips his tail, bringing up the oboes
then the high notes of the flutes. Other souls,
those I sense but cannot see,
wait among the stones along the riverbank
until they’re sure the magpie is distracted,
then scentless and inedible to anyone but him,
they make their wingless foray
across the ice and running water,
mouthfuls of silence that, if not for coyotes,
the magpie would hear.
 


DON’T SAY IT
You admire the wild grasses
for their reticence.
When you cut across the dusk for home,
the meadow is more beautiful
for all it keeps inside.
Syllables of seeds catch in your socks
but they don’t need to say,
Thank you, friend,
even if you’ve carried them
for miles.
 
THE FIRST DAY OF THE YEAR
The new writer sucks her fingers
in her crib. There is nothing
to distinguish her – like the extra toe
on Hemingway’s
literary cats – from all the other
babies down the block.
She is dreaming ink
though she hasn’t seen it
in this world yet
and no one knows,
least of all her parents,
she loves nothing
better than the blank
flat whiteness
of the bottom sheet
when she’s laid damp
from her morning bath
upon it.

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0771023294
• ISBN 13: 9780771023293
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112