by Lorna Crozie|rGreystone Books
~ Review in Halifax Herald, September 2009
Lorna Crozier grew up on the prairies where everything is big. Huge. Skyscapes are unbroken, miles of blue meeting miles of waving green grain at the horizon. It is hard to convince city dwellers that this expanse of unbroken sameness is amazing, unless you are Lorna Crozier. Her memoir of growing up on the Canadian prairies pours out the vastness of the landscape, the hugeness of the skyscape and the feeling of dirt and dust under your fingernails.
“Calm or restless, the sky followPublish Posts your every step. It touches you with loneliness. It humbles your tongue. Nothing is taller, more open.”
It was hard, growing up dirt poor in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in a town with one main street and two beer parlours. The vignettes in Small Beneath the Sky are recollections of a childhood where alcohol was ever present and money was hard to come by. It was hard for a girl to fit in. “High school wasn’t about learning geo-trig or chemistry or Shakespeare’s plays. It was about learning how to belong, how to fit in, a desperate and hopeless task.”
But there is much love and beauty in Swift Current. With her poet’s eye, Crozier lays out the taste and smell and feel of her childhood. “The sun shone through the glass as I tilted the drink to my mouth. It tasted better than oranges, even the ones from Japan that came only at Christmas.”
“On either side of the six steps that led to our front door, two lilac bushes exploded into fragrant blossoms every spring . . . The opposite of frugality, the lilacs made us special; they hid the poverty of the house, the messy yard, the worry that lived inside the walls.”
When poets write prose, readers are usually in for a treat and Crozier does not disappoint. Her memoir is a tender reflection of her youth, and we are left with prairie visions dancing in our heads. Even the city dwellers among us must now be now convinced that the ‘unbroken sameness’ of the prairies is amazing.
Lorna Crozier has published 15 books of poetry, edited several anthologies and received numerous awards for her work. She lives in Saanich, British Columbia.
