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.

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What Whetstone tries to capture are those luminous moments that we sense on the edge of our days, those moments when we become fully attentive and engaged with the world: the snow, the grass called little quaking, a sudden gesture from a father, long dead. I’m looking at my life now through the lens of middle age, a time when everything seems to have an autumn glow about it, light low to the ground, all things passing. The inspiration for the poems is simply my coaxing out of silence what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “inscapes,” moments of intense seeing, hearing, touching, when the things around me hold me, too, in their eyes, when I see myself before my birth, the Lord of Light striding across the prairie sky, the dead gathering under bridges, about to cross to the other side.
–Lorna Crozier

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“Breathtakingly down-to-earth and reassuringly lyrical, new poems by Lorna Crozier are always a reason for rejoicing.”
–Globe and Mail

“[She has the] ability to create poems in which almost impossibly delicate, sharply focused imagery evokes emotional vastness.”
–Vancouver Sun

“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.…”
–Books in Canada

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Lorna Crozier’s work has won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and the First Prize for Poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. She has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently, Whetstone. Crozier also edited Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she teaches at the University of Victoria.

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