Small Beneath The Sky [Hardcover]

Lorna Crozier is a poet, anthologist, and creative writing teacher. But readers coming to her memoir seeking an account of the writing life will be disappointed. Rather, this is a book about her relationship with her immediate family, especially her parents. The trouble is that the circumstances of Crozier’s life in Swift Current, the small Saskatchewan city where she grew up, are mostly unremarkable. The PR copy refers to “the grief and shame caused by poverty and alcoholism.” True, her parents were too poor to own a house, and their rentals sound pretty dilapidated, but they had a car and a speedboat and the family was never in danger of starving. Her father drinks, but he’s more of an after-work-beers-at-the-Legion sloppy drunk than a destructive dipsomaniac. The shame in the book is caused more by small-town status anxiety than skeletons in the closet. Through it all, Lorna does her darnedest to fit in. She gets her first period, gets bullied, gets felt up by boys, acts in the school musical, and becomes high school valedictorian. Her best friend gets pregnant and married at fifteen, so Lorna resolves to abstain from sex – and she does, until she finally marries “to break [her] maidenly state.” The humdrumness of these events isn’t irredeemable, but the writing provides little relief. Style has never been Crozier’s forte and her prose here ranges from plodding to purple. She lacks the raconteur’s instinct for pacing and anecdotal embellishment that makes the work of such disparate memoirists as Frank McCourt and David Sedaris hum, and the only humour in the book is of the accidental variety, such as when Tiny, her brother’s poultricidal Pomeranian, is likened, sans irony, to Cerberus. The subtitle of this book is “A Prairie Memoir,” and the best parts tend to be the interludes in which Crozier riffs on some aspect of the landscape. More of this and fewer tedious quotidian details would have been welcome. Ultimately, however, Small Beneath the Sky seems to have been written more for the author’s catharsis than the reader’s enjoyment.

"An artful blend of poetry and prose, Crozier's memoir is one of those rare books the English essayist Francis Bacon would have recommended to be chewed and digested.'" (Subterrain 20091128)

"The Governor General's Award-winning poet's vivid narrative about her upbringing in Swift Current, Sask. Her father, Emerson, was an alcoholic, and we come to know the shame she experienced living with poverty and addiction. Her mother, Peggy, was a tough proud woman who never wasted a potato and who loved her daughter fiercely, if quietly. This is a fast read, due in great part to Crozier's superb ability to tell a story simply and from the gut." (National Post 20090927)

"With her poet's eye, Crozier lays out the taste and smell and feel of her childhood...Her memoir is a tender reflection of her youth, and we are left with prairie visions dancing in our heads." (Chronicle Herald 20090815)

"[Lorna Crozier's] poetic gift gives her prose a wonderful edge and clarity." (Winnipeg Free Press 20090713)

"How rare such honesty is, and how hard-won, and radical, and beautiful!" (Ursula LeGuin 20090713)

"Crozier's prose illuminates our world. She is a writer of the first rank." (David Adams Richards 20090809)

"Crozier's character sketches are solid but it's her poet's eye that rewards an attentive reader." (Toronto Star 20090518)

"Lorna Crozier has written a memoir that is not so much brilliant (although brilliant it is), as profoundly felt, rich with metaphor and lyrical language, pure in its generosity. I found it deeply touching." (Sharon Butala, author of "The Perfection of the Morning" 20090520)

"This intimate and moving memoir is filled with a kind of clear prairie light, and reveals all that dwells in the shadows as well as everything that shines." (Jane Urquhart, author of "A Map of Glass" 20090522)

"Lorna Crozier has woven the delicate threads of a particular place, time and family into a powerful, big-hearted, poignant, funny, wise and utterly arresting memoir." (Guy Vanderhaeghe 20090814)

"For the thousands in this valley, like me, who still have prairie dirt under your fingernails and between your toes after decades away, there is a book you're going to want to have...Lorna Crozier's new memoir...is a book of home...if home to you was in your mother's or grandmother's Saskatchewan kitchen, or vegetable garden, that is exactly where it will take you. You will be flung there, breathless, suddenly smelling hot roll kuken and watermelon. Fresh bread and Saskatoon berry jam. Chokecherry syrup. Hot, salty, fat as cracklings spit and hiss on the stove. Today, I am overcome with missing a place I don't want to be." (Kelowna Daily Courier 20090822)

"Small Beneath the Sky begins with light. Which is so appropriate to this landscape it would seem a shame to begin anywhere else. Light, not dust, humour, not misery, infuse this memoir. Like the Prairies, a thing worth returning to." (Globe & Mail 20090826)

"Small Beneath the Sky is a slender book, not quite 200 pages long, but it packs a punch. It is about the birthplace that you claim as your own, about your starting point, the way you understand yourself, the place you return where there's nowhere else to go.' It is also about telling a personal story finely, without blinking. The book is in the end not just about Lorna Crozier, but about you and me and everyone else who ever lived their lives in small towns like Swift Current or Owen Sound." (Sun Times 20090926)

"How fortunate we are that the Prairie sky did not silence Crozier's literary tongue. The Governor General's Award-winning poet has created a vivid and poignant narrative about her upbringing in Swift Current, Sask." (Edmonton Journal 20091002)

"Unflinchingly honest, yet both reflective and descriptive, Crozier shares with us her hardscrabble upbringing, making use of both anecdotes and poetry to paint a true-life literary picture of her lower middles class Canadian family." (CFMG-FM 20091017)

"How fortunate the Prairie sky didn't silence Crozier's literary tongue...writing with commendable honesty, the Victoria writer presents a captivating and impressively detailed account of her life and her relationship with her parents." (Vancouver Sun 20091024)

"Woven in between the recollections are prose poems that deftly capture the essence of the Saskatchewan aesthetic and experience. I devoured these descriptive passages about dust, wind, snow, insects and other physical aspects of Saskatchewan. They are meaty, evocative, as rich and thick as fresh cream. Crozier, with her stunning precision for words and her inability to overlook the seemingly insignificant, injects spirituality and meaning into the sensory elements of the Prairies." (Regina Leader Post 20091028)

"Poet Lorna Crozier's lyrical, wistful Small Beneath the Sky depicts extreme poverty and family secrets in Swift Current, Sask. In one exquisite scene,Crozier, as valedictorian, must dance the first waltz (just like a bride) at graduation with her unreliable, alcoholic father." (More Magazine 20091101)

"In these recollections, Crozier courageously tells the story of both light and dust. The secrets have now been released." (Synergy Magazine )