The Quiet in Me: An Interview with Lorna Crozier

Patrick Lane was revered as one of Canada’s most prolific and influential poets. When he died in 2019 at the age of seventy-nine, he left behind 25 collections of poetry, works of fiction and nonfiction, and a heart-broken community of readers, students, and friends.

In 2014, Patrick published Washita, a stunning collection of poems which was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award. With Patrick’s death many of us thought this may be his final poetry book. But fortunately, there were more poems which Lorna Crozier, his wife and acclaimed fellow poet, has edited into a beautiful, moving collection of final poems. The Quiet In Me contains lyrical meditations on the connectivity of the natural world, life and death, memory, and what haunts us. In “Small Elegy” Patrick writes, “The silence of the dead is what we own. / It’s why we sing.” Only someone who has devoted his whole life to poetry could write so spare, while also conjuring such a wild, mysterious force, to the very end.

Rosemary Griebel: This posthumous collection of poems, The Quiet In Me, is such a beautiful gift to poetry readers. Did the editing of this book comfort and distract you from grief, or did it amplify Patrick’s silence?

Lorna Crozier: The editing of these poems didn’t comfort me and distract me, quite the opposite. I put off reading them closely for months because I knew it would be difficult to have to occupy his mind and his heart in the deep way that would be necessary to understand the poems, his intentions, and their demands as I tried to nudge them from early versions to the final drafts.

RG: In your Introduction to the collection, you mention that the editing of Patrick’s final poems “was a daunting task.” Can you speak further to that?

LC: The editing process drew Patrick out of silence for me. I began to talk to him out loud, to say things like, “I hope you’re okay if I take out this word,” etc. It wasn’t easy to make changes, even though they were usually minor, because we never did that to one another’s poems before. We’d make suggestions, sure, and write editing notes on the pages, but the final decision was always left up to the poet. This time I had to decide whether to follow my advice or not. He would not have tolerated that had he been alive. But he wasn’t, and I ended up saying to himself and to me, “Well, who better to do this?” We’d been living and writing in the same house for close to forty years, and there was no bigger admirer of his work than me.

RG: Were all the poems in this collection written after Washita, or did Patrick return to some earlier, unpublished pieces for the manuscript?

LC: I don’t know if all of these poems were written after Washita. Certainly most of them were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few had been floating around before that. And a few I added to the folder he’d given me to seek my editorial opinion. “A Christmas Poem” is probably the oldest, predating Washita. He wrote it at the request of Peter Gzowski for Morningside. After his death, three others, “Fog on the South Shore,” “Icebergs Off Fogo Island,” and “The Sea Is Our Home” were sent to me by Kim Grey, the editor of the e-mag, Toque and Canoe. Patrick had written them when he came with me on a writing assignment to Fogo Island in 2016. He’d probably lost them, but I thought they were good enough to be included with the others he’d shown me as a possible manuscript.

RG: Patrick’s declining sight and debilitating health required him to adopt a more laboured way to put poem to paper, letter by slow letter. Can you talk about how his illness influenced the crafting of these final poems, and also his unwavering drive to create?

LC: One of the things that was so obvious about Patrick was his absolute dedication to his life work, the crafting of poetry. And in the last few decades, the writing of prose, first his memoir, then two novels. His last novel, Deep River Night, had been accepted for publication by M&S, but he fell ill in the middle of the editing process. I remember so clearly when he was in the hospital once again, he received an email from his editor suggesting that he write an entirely new first chapter. Though he was too sick to read or walk or carry on a conversation, he did it. And it is beautiful. Though he’d started a third novel, he ended up giving up on that because he couldn’t concentrate on the long stretches of time a novel demands. Even in his weakened state, though, he couldn’t give up on what defined him as a human being and his place in the world—finding the words to make sense of his time on earth. That’s how these poems got created; as long as he was breathing, he had to turn his internal music into language, he had to continue to sing his songs.

RG: You mention in the Introduction that even while dying Patrick’s greatest sorrow was the destruction of the natural world. Certainly, Patrick’s attentiveness and devotion to nature was detailed throughout his life’s work, but in this collection, it is even more pronounced and poignant. For example, in the poem” Bitter” he writes “It is the honey lands you will leave, / the land of the bees and the fat birds calling … Sift me with the withered seeds in your fists.” Can you comment on his connection to nature, particularly in his final years?

LC: I worried about how Patrick was going to be able to deal with the catastrophic effects of climate change. Of course, any thinking person gets upset by the news about the environment, but he was particularly sensitive to those stories. Part of that sensitivity comes from his early years as a hiker and over-nighter in the mountains of the Okanagan. He walked with coyotes and bob cats and moose and came to know their beauties and their habits. Part of it comes from a tenderness and empathy for the other creatures of the earth. Like William Blake who reminded us to see a world in a grain of sand, Patrick saw a world in a leaf, a wolf spider, a hummingbird’s small heart. He used to claim it was because he was born myopic and could only see things very close at hand. That made him pay attention to the intricate worlds of the miniature, moths and dragonflies and poverty grass, and see up close their intrinsic value and beauty. In his final years, this recognition hurt him because so much of the natural world that he had known and loved was disappearing and wouldn’t come back.

RG: Patrick writes in the beautiful elegy “Kintsugi”: “I am outside myself, without disguise. / There is only little left to know. Water returns to water. / The dew in my eyes, a moment ago an ocean.” Many of the poems speak to the circular nature of seasons, memory, and life itself. This circularity feels like a springboard to something more ineffable or transcendent. Can you comment?

LC: When I read these pages, I feel I am reading the work of a very wise man, one who has gone through difficult times, but who has never turned his eyes away from suffering. They’re the words, not of a young man who expects answers or surcease, but an older man who is looking back, even at his younger self, with clear eyes and a big heart. A man who also has learned to see what is in front of him and treasure it. A man who has studied the old texts and absorbed the teachings of the masters. He hears the ghosts and listens, but he also values the ones who are close to him now and is able to look back on his years, even his losses, without regret.

RG: Although the poems in this collection are aware of the beckoning finger of death, they are not filled with anguish or despair. In fact, the poems sing, and contain a certain wonder of the world that has always been present in Patrick’s poems, but particularly so in The Quiet In Me. Is this the work of a poet not only reconciled to death but welcoming it?

LC: Patrick never told me he thought he was dying. He kept saying, “All shall be well.” I don’t know if he was in denial or if he was trying to protect me from the sadness our talking about his demise would have brought to our last days. I regret that we didn’t talk about that now. After, when I went through his email to see if there was any business I needed to take care of, I found a note to our good friend, Sean Virgo. Patrick had written, “I can taste my death in my mouth.” So I guess he knew he wasn’t going to get better and perhaps he was reconciled to it. I don’t like to think he welcomed it, however. I don’t like to think that he was fine with leaving me.

RG: Patrick was a great teacher and mentor. What lessons do you think emerging poets might take from Patrick’s literary legacy?

LC: Patrick’s passion for poetry was without question at the centre of his life. He believed in honouring the local, in appreciating your place and your ancestors. He believed in being generous with the writing of others and in doing your own work with as much attention and love as you would bring a garden. He believed in the value of your own stories, no matter what kind of background you’d come from. He believed in learning from those who went before him and shaping one’s own voice, both influenced by the masters but marked by your own tenor and music. He believed in working through your words toward beauty and justice and respect for all living things. I think these are all lessons and part of his legacy to other poets.