Book Review: Small beneath the Sky (a prairie memoir) by Lorna Crozier

Small beneath the Sky (a prairie memoir) fostered a very lively discussion at book club yesterday afternoon. Our own heavy Victoria snows did not keep anyone away. After all, most of us lived, walked and drove in prairie winters at one time. Some of us were even raised there in other corners of Saskatchewan. 

In just under two hundred pages, Lorna Crozier, a celebrated author, shows us the prairies and her growing up years. Intertwined, they can only be separated in poetry and in prose. Small beneath the Sky, a very fitting title for this slim volume, takes the reader through the generational turbulence of prairie life into her growing up years. 

Ms. Crozier certainly had ample reason for laying blame with alcoholism and poverty as much woven into her personal fabric as the effect of the prairies. She shies away from a ‘blame game’, however, telling the story of her early life, her parents and grandparents just as it was then. She speaks of her fierce love for her mother and father, despite their differences and failings. The 1950’s and 1960’s in the small southern Saskatchewan city of Swift Current were not unlike the experiences of many of us growing up in that time, whether in city neighbourhoods, farms on the prairies or any small town. 

Ms. Crozier states ‘…..I am indebted to Aristotle, who hypothesized that there must be something beyond the chain of cause and effect, something that started it all. He called this force the first cause.’ Her short poetic vignettes about prairie landscape and weather, woven through her own story, shows this reader that there are many ‘first causes’. Prairie weather shaped not only the land but the lives of immigrants and their families that planted and harvested our grains on this treeless, sky domed land.

“Wherever you go, you speak with the earth on your tongue, in the accent 

passed down for generations. It’s a lengthening of vowels, 

a dusty drawl thin enough to be carried some distance by the wind.”

~ Lorna Crozier, Small beneath the Sky (a prairie memoir)

Title: Small Beneath the Sky (a prairie memoir)

Author: Lorna Crozier

Copyright: 2009 by Lorna Crozier

Publisher: Greystone Books

Type: Paperback

Format: Memoir

ISBN: 978-1-155365-343-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-55365-577-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-1926812-27-4 (ebook)