God of Shadows

The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising.

How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen?
The poet Lorna Crozier has, for some time, been offering her readers glimpses into the strange corners of her personal cosmologies. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods humanity never knew existed and didn't know it needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting.
What profound question have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so lovely and so lively and also so much fun?

LORNA CROZIER is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, including What the Soul Doesn't Want, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for Inventing the Hawk and three additional collections were finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received five honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian Literature. She lives in British Columbia with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats who love to garden.