“Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir”

Abstract

This article focuses on metaphoric structures in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (2009). Crozier’s straightforward narrative of incidents from her past is structured around a series of poetic vignettes describing originary phenomena that have shaped her. The “first causes,” as she calls them metaphorically, add up to the familiar mix of parameters of origin and belonging: the intimate place/landscape, family, and discourse. My aim is to demonstrate how Crozier’s metaphors contribute to the world of interrelatedness she constructs in the memoir. In the process, Crozier continues to develop a broader project of the revisioning of patriarchal mythologies (e. g., the Canadian myth of the prairie West) from a female/feminist point of view.