Whether Animals. Pondering Animality in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry
Whether Animals. Pondering Animality in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry

Summary/Abstract: The following analysis of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, a Canadian contemporary poet, owes a lot to the discussion concerning the changing perception of animals in present-day Western culture. The boundary between the human and the animal becomes, therefore, blurred, which, in turn, is reflected in, for example, new laws that regulate the legal status of apes. The traditional man vs. animal or culture vs. nature dichotomy seems to be particularly interesting in the Canadian context, where the volatile nature of the wilderness has been understood primarily in the context of threat to the human life. Thus, the theorists of Canadianness have emphasized the strictly-defined boundaries between nature/wilderness and civilization. However, Lorna Crozier—a Canadian prairie poet—understands those boundaries not as places of rupture, but rather as places of convergence, places of meeting between the man and the animal, in which interspecies communication becomes possible.

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