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.

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A Word about The Blue Hour of the Day by Lorna Crozier

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been writing poetry for over thirty years, and publishing with McClelland & Stewart for over twenty, beginning with my sixth book of poetry, The Garden Going On Without Us in 1985. Now, after fourteen books, most of which have been kept in print, it seemed time to sort through the poems and compile a selected of what I think is my best work.

It was humbling and terrifying to choose what I want to survive. A selected poems is, for me, a showcase for the writer’s life. The poems I chose from each book read now like small chapters of a poetic memoir that has tracked my experiences from the young woman I was when I started writing to who I am today. There’s been sadness along the way, a lot of outrage and laughter, and a number of obsessions. (There are so many poems about horses and angels!) This book says, more than anything else, how I place myself in this puzzling and beautiful world. I hope readers will find their own blue hour of the day to find some pleasure within its pages.

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"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 Year

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Lorna Crozier has published fifteen books of poetry, including The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems; Whetstone; Apocrypha of Light; What the Living Won’t Let Go; A Saving Grace; Everything Arrives at the Light; Inventing the Hawk; Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence; and The Garden Going On Without Us. She has also edited several anthologies, among them Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast and Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she teaches at the University of Victoria.

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