Lorna Crozier - Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)

Praise for
Through the Garden and Lorna Crozier

This book is a glimpse into forty years of intimacywhat it means to adore, endure, defy, devote, grieve. It is a witnessing of final daysardent with longing, aching candour, and a powerful tenderness.

Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces

Emotionally brave and profoundly tender, this book will introduce you to beautifully wrought gardens of poetry, and to two deeply creative individuals who, side by side, flourished in those gardens. A moving and life-affirming reading experience.

Jane Urquhart, author of The Stone Carvers

Lorna Crozier gives us the flesh-and-blood thrill of becoming a poet, and then the high romance of finding and losing the poet she loves. Her passionate memoir is unabashed and never less than fascinating.

Elizabeth Hay, author of All Things Consoled

With feet bare and a heart full of love and longing, Lorna Crozier walks us back to the beginnings of our own fragile bones and back to the place where roots hold us until we become them, until we are the love we planted.

Gregory Scofield, author of Witness, I Am

To read Lorna Croziers memoir is to follow two legends of Canadian letters down an enchanted garden path, through the early days of their boozy, Carver-esque romance to the final destination of an endless, timeless love. Overflowing with poetry, wisdom, and cats, this book demands re-reading, for your heart may struggle to hold it all.

Marjorie Celona, author of How a Woman Becomes a Lake

A work of searing intensity, Through the Garden stands as a testament to poetry, love, and longing. Chronicling her fiery romance with her husband, the poet Patrick Lane, and his subsequent descent into a mysterious illness, Lorna Crozier reminds us that remembering lies at the heart of who we are. This is one of the great love stories of our time.

Steven Price, author of Lampedusa

In Through the Garden, Lorna Crozier lays a path between lifes two great mysterieslove and death. Her gaze is honest and steady, never faltering, whether examining her own heart or looking into the eyes of her dying partner. Out of such bold courage comes a book that is like loveagonizing and joyful, replete with poetry and story, a wellspring of wisdom and truth.

Merilyn Simonds, author of Refuge

BOOKS BY LORNA CROZIER

POETRY

Inside Is the Sky (1976)

Crows Black Joy (1979)

No Longer Two People (with Patrick Lane) (1979)

Humans and Other Beasts (1980)

The Weather (1983)

The Garden Going On Without Us (1985)

Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988)

Inventing the Hawk (1992)

Everything Arrives at the Light (1995)

A Saving Grace (1996)

What the Living Wont Let Go (1999)

Apocrypha of Light (2002)

Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003)

Whetstone (2005)

The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems (2007)

Small Mechanics (2011)

The Wrong Cat (2015)

The Wild in You: Voices from the Forest and the Sea (2015)

What the Soul Doesnt Want (2017)

God of Shadows (2018)

The House the Spirit Builds (2019)

ANTHOLOGIES

A Sudden Radiance (with Gary Hyland) (1987)

Breathing Fire (with Patrick Lane) (1995)

Desire in Seven Voices (2000)

Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (with Patrick Lane) (2001)

Breathing Fire 2 (with Patrick Lane) (2004)

The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things (2012)

NON-FICTION

Small Beneath the Sky (2009)

FOR CHILDREN

Lots of Kisses (2014)

So Many Babies (2015)

More Than Balloons (2017)

Copyright 2020 by Lorna Crozier

McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to reprint the following previously published material: : Self-Centred was first published in What the Soul Doesnt Want (Freehand Books, 2017).

All excerpts from There Is a Season and Deep River Night by Patrick Lane Patrick Lane and reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.

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All excerpts from poems by Lorna Crozier Lorna Crozier and reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

ISBN9780771021183

Ebook ISBN9780771021206

Book design: Emma Dolan

Cover images: (photograph) Bob Siemens; (photo frame) Krasovski Dmitri / Shutterstock; (Cherry blossoms) xiangyan meng / Getty Images; (Paper sheet) Flavio Coelho / Getty Images; (rope) NYS444/iStock/Getty Images;

Photo : Rafal Gerszak

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

a Penguin Random House Company

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

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For my beloved, Patrick Lane, who wrote,
your hand in my hand in the dark.

POEM ME

I came to him that first night and said, Poem me.

And he did.

He came to me that first night and said, Poem me.

And I did.

Of our hours we made a poem.

Of our years we made a poem.

Many things happened in between.

Many things were rubbed out, repeated,

neglected, ignored, stained, thrown away.

But this morning he said, Poem me.

This morning I said, Poem me.

And we made of our lives a poem.

This morning I am full of prayer though I do not utter it. I pray all goes well this fine morning. Lorna is back from her retreat. Ive just seen her at the kitchen door in her red robe. She is letting the cats out and once theyre on the deck she calls my name as if it were a question and I answer and say, Im here, here in the garden. She comes to me then with two cups of coffee and as she walks across the moss I see what beauty is and am undone by it. I say to her, You are beautiful, and she smiles as she comes to me barefoot, her feet wet with dew.

Pray God, there may be many more days, I whisper.

Patrick Lane, There Is a Season

February, 2017

SPRING COMES EARLY to Vancouver Island. Its still a surprise though its been twenty-seven years since we moved to the rain coast. There are many advantages to this temperate climate, some not as obvious as the early return of the male robins or the snowdrops whitening the borders of our front lawn instead of real snow. If we have to euthanize our cat and bury him, the ground will not be frozen eight feet down, as it is until late April in Saskatchewan, where I was born. Well dig, and the winter earth will give. It will open up to take his tawny, long-haired, skinny, beloved body.