Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier on Gardens and Cats: Memoirs of Loss and Sustenance

Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, both prominent Canadian poets, spent together over four decades as partners and later as a married couple. While original and unique in their respective visions and concepts they present in their poetry, both often focus on the deep links between human and non-human, people and the world of animate and inanimate nature. This focus is also prominent in their memoirs: Lane’s There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden (2004; published in the US as What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered), and Crozier’s Through the Garden: A Love Story (With Cats) (2020). This article focuses specifically on the literal and metaphoric meanings and roles of gardens and cats in the process of coming to terms with loss (in particular death) and change as described in the two memoirs. The former is Lane’s meditation on the process of recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, which is accompanied by a reflection on his past, in particular his relationship with his mother—all told in the context of his work on developing his garden. One of his poignant conclusions is “What we are is a garden”, picked up by Crozier in Through the Garden, which explores the last two years of Lane’s life, marked by grave illness, and the story of their relationship—a life lived with cats.