I’ve had a copy of Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir for quite a while. Like so many of my books, it has languished on a shelf somewhere, and I do mean “somewhere,” because my copy has gone missing, and I had to borrow one from the library. Still, I’ve been asked to read a graduate student’s thesis, and Small Beneath the Sky is one of the books she discusses in her paper, and I thought this was finally my chance to read it. I’m glad I did; it’s wonderful.
Small Beneath the Sky is partly a memoir about growing up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in the 1950s and 1960s. Hiding in that memoir is a Künstlerroman, a story about an artist’s development, although the focus is more about her family, their poverty, her father’s drinking, what a small city on the prairies was like back then. The other part of the book considers Crozier’s relationship with her parents as an adult, including grieving their deaths. Both parts are powerfully written.
Interspersed between the prose chapters of the memoir are shorter chapters of what I’m going to call (perhaps incorrectly) prose poetry. Each is identified with the title “first cause” followed by some aspect of life in this part of the world: “first cause: light,” “first cause: grass,” “first cause: sky,” “first cause: insects.” They’re beautiful, which isn’t surprising, given Crozier’s stature as a poet. The notion of a first cause, as the book points out, comes from Aristotle: it’s something that precedes the chains of cause and effect, an “immovable force” that “started it all.” The suggestion that these environmental (understood broadly) phenomena are the first causes of Crozier’s life is fascinating, since they would also be the first causes of the lives of everyone else who was born in southern Saskatchewan in the late 1940s, but her story is unique, the way theirs would be, too. So we have all of these first causes, which set in motion all of these different chains of effects and causes. That relationship between the general and the particular is a mystery. Maybe that’s Crozier’s point. It’s something I’ll be thinking about from now on.