Through The Garden

A powerful, deeply affecting portrait of a long marriage and a clear-eyed account of the impact of grief, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry from one of Canada's most celebrated voices.

We ran off together in 1978, abandoning our marriages and leaving wreckage in our wake. I was a "promising writer," Patrick has just won the Governor General's Award. I was so happy for him, and I've continued to be every time an honour comes his way, but I knew if I didn't grow, if I remained merely someone who showed potential, we wouldn't last. I swore I wouldn't play the dutiful wife, cheerleader, and muse, of the great male writer, and he didn't want a partner like that. We wanted to flourish together and thrive in words and books and gardens.

"Canada's powerhouse literary couple," Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's partnership spanned forty years before his death in March 2019. They wrote more than forty books between them, balancing their writing lives and their occasionally tumultuous relationship. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed forever when Patrick fell seriously ill. Despite tests and the opinions of many specialists, doctors were baffled--there was no diagnosis and no treatment plan. Patrick's illness was devastating to them both.
During this time, Lorna turned to her writing--and Patrick's--as a way of making sense of her grief and as consolation. The result is an intimate, revealing, and intensely moving memoir that traces the two most significant forces in Lorna's life: her work in poetry and her partnership with the writer Patrick Lane. Through the Garden is an elegy, a love story, and a lesson in what poetry is and can do.