Poet Arleen Paré

Friday, december 1
arleen pare and LORNA CROZIER

Arleen Paré is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014), He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press, 2015), and First (Brick Books, 2021). Her work has been short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and has twice won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry. Her recent chapbook book, Last, won the bpNichol Award in 2022. Her latest collection is Absence of Wings. She lives in Victoria, BC, with her wife, Chris Fox.

In this volume, Paré bears witness to the brief, meteoric life of A., the daughter of her younger sister, adopted from Brazil at age eight – a songbird, and angel in a purple coast. Weaving together poetry and prose, historical record and voiced speculation, Paré recreates an unfolding tragedy: attachment and love across borders and marrows set within the context of explicit and implicit racism, the vulnerability of children (past, present, worldwide) and the failure of safety nets. – adapted from an endorsement for Absence of Wings by poet Laura Apol.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Absence of Wings”

so light she could be a bird   a heron   fine boned and winged
a small heron   not blue   or a lark   but not meadow
or a small angel   wingless   in a wide purple coat
a hummingbird   she could be a hummingbird   restive
with a ruby-red throat

Poet Lorna Crozier

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime.

A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn't Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island.

From Lorna Crozier, the poet Ursula Le Guin called a “truth teller” and “visionary,” comes this new collection of soul-stirring poems that follow the death of a loved one. After That is a book written from the dark hollow we fall into when we lose those we love. Lorna Crozier’s sure poetry finds the words to engage with the grief that comes from the death of her partner, the writer Patrick Lane, whom she’d lived with for forty years, many of them tumultuous. With grace and precision, she illuminates sorrow. The light the poems cast travels far enough to reach anyone who has experienced loss. These pages engage us with many familiar yet magical things—not only paper wasps, but their libraries; not only herons, but their role as aging monks. Crozier takes us through the domestic and natural worlds into the cagey and metaphysical place we call the beyond. Without offering false comfort, the poems turn over our own grief so that we can catch a glimpse of the new life inside us again.

Poetic Appetizer
from “After That”

Speak slowly with many pauses
                        between the words. 
It’s those pauses that are doing the work.
The one you cannot hear can hear them.