Good poetry always makes me question the hardest elements of being alive. The difference between reading poetry and sitting through a hard counselling session is simple: the words are painted on the page in such a way that no matter how hard they make me cringe in an introspective, damn-I-wish-that-came-from-my-brain-first kind of way, I always want more of them.
Local poet Lorna Crozier’s new collection What the Soul Doesn’t Want is no exception to that wistful plethora of feelings. She does exactly what the title promises: captures the sensations around grief, loss, the effects of time, and the general disposability of humans (or, as she says in “Time Studies,” “God draws a life then rubs it out/with the eraser on his pencil. It smears but does its job”). She says this in a way that makes a thought that’s dark and decaying yet freeing.
The poems in Crozier’s latest collection—which is her 17th—will ignite a selfless curiosity in the young parent, will bring about a second hunger for life in the aging retiree; they’ll have some kind of impact on the reader, wherever they fall on that spectrum. Each and every word Crozier writes has a sharp, darkening edge to it, but in the shadows of those words lay empathy and understanding that will keep the loneliest of readers afloat in a literary cocoon late into the night.
Some of the poems were, at first read, a tad too abstract, but even then, Crozier let her creativity prevail; I don’t have to understand it all objectively because each poem is crafted in such a way that the reader will feel it was written solely for them, when they needed it.
What the Soul Doesn’t Want book launch
7 pm Tuesday, May 30
Free, Munro’s Books
munrobooks.com