The ‘gut and the heart rule’
Hunger: The Poetry of Susan Musgrave
Selected with an introduction by Micheline Maylor
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025
$23.99 / 9781771126953
Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith
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This new book—the 41st—in the Laurier Poetry Series, attends, deservedly, to the work of a long career poet, Susan Musgrave. The publication continues the series concept, as described by current series editor Tanis MacDonald in her Foreword, “to produce beautiful volumes and to alert readers to poems that remain vital to thinking about urgencies of the contemporary moment,” providing readers with “‘more poetry in their poetry’.”
Next is the poet’s Biographical Note, followed Micheline Maylor’s “Introduction: Damage Makes Things Interesting,” which undertakes research of reviews and commentary of other essayists and peers, cites some poems, and reports on one-on-one conversations with the poet. These glimpses and reflections perceptively and authoritatively shine light into Musgrave’s visceral verse.
At last, Masset-based Susan Musgrave appears, through the selected works—thirty-five poems, plumbed from her four most recent books, including Exculpatory Lilies and Origami Dove. And in the Afterword, the final reflections are left to her, via the revelatory essay, “Witch Gives Way to Woman.”
Musgrave’s life circumstances are deeply intertwined with her poetry—a life of notoriety, well reported on, its biographical details drawing, perhaps, more fascination than her poems have.
But readers do attend, and such readers cannot avoid Musgrave’s first person—its rarely disguised “I,” and its descriptive details:
I stroke your thin hands, kiss
the track marks along your arm,
the veins that took me somewhere
I never intended to go. At first
the sound
Notice the first comma and the line break, isolating the “kiss” and forcing us to pause, to linger with it. Then there’s the line break at “somewhere” raising a questioning for the reader—where?— thereby inserting drama and engagement; this is followed, in the next line, by the reveal, the journey beyond the poet’s intention or lack of intention. Next the period pops in, stopping us at “go”; and then “At first” on that same line, indicating, if you read that line as without punctuation, that the poet, secondly, becomes willing to “go.” But it’s not that simple—there’s a line break and then a stanza space, to challenge reader’s expectation, and a lead into a new direction. The shift has given a small surprise.
I’m parsing here so we can get—through this one example, for now—to the poet’s creations, the centre of the book—so not to delay, much longer, entering the poems to directly observe Musgrave’s poetic craft, her knowledge of structure, and its weaving with personal material.
It seems relevant to pause here to note the formatted architecture of the book. It is prefaced thrice—with the series editor Tanis MacDonald’s Foreword, a Musgrave biographical note, and then introducer-editor-essayer Maylor. All provide noteworthy contemplations, although the bio and series editor commentary might best be placed at the end, as afternotes, letting the poet ‘speak’ sooner.
It is tempting—in view of Musgrave’s biography—to be a psychologist and to speculate on patterns of lived behaviour. Even so, the challenge here is to dwell mainly within the poems and reflect on her poetics—the language and structures that carry the content—biographical or reflective.
The essay by Maylor serves as essential introduction, combining poetic attentions, while noting Musgrave’s early and current life and locale. Maylor offers: observances at the poet’s homestead near Masset, in Haida Gwaii; glances at her knick-knacks and environment; details of her poetics; and reference to earlier works.
Plus, a compact assessment:
Her poetry is personal, intimate, confessional, esoteric, and infused with a sadness that develops over time. Poems develop into a resonant, direct depth and precision akin to those of feminist poets like Anne Sexton, Marie Howe, or Anne Finch, or Canada’s own mystical-hippies poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Big company. Maylor affirms: “Of course Musgrave’s poetry is world-class….”
Maylor also notes that the poetry contains “mysticism as life narratives and has the hardwired attention to sound and grammatical caesura that appears so often in Musgrave’s works.” Maylor, with the eye of a poet, observes further:
The gut and the heart rule…Her impeccable use of grammar is that kind that causes poets a sort of aesthetic arrest…The use of colons and question marks as midline-forced full-stops gave me a new standard for structural parallelism and a kind of a craft that is master class of internal free verse craft.
These are terrific insights that help enable close and expansive reading.
Meanwhile, back at that poetry, with its mid-length yet compact lines whose phrases—often documentary—are at different times grim, painful, grieving, existential, on occasion witty, and more rarely, a channel for comic levity.
In “Rest Area: No Loitering and Other Signs of the Times”:
the average Canadian considers life too short
to stuff a mushroom, thinks poutine is French
cuisine, is too polite to take the last
piece of Christmas cake from the plate…
… says I’m sorry 4.8 times a minute.
And holding contradictions while flipping the mood, in “God Loves a Drug Dealer”:
This girl sells the heroin you can’t live
without. She said she would donate your hair
to a good cause, like cancer, and I thought
trust you to find a drug dealer with a social conscience.
Here, once again I hover on a line break—“you can’t live”—where, though the story continues, the break forces a face-on, poignant recognition of impending doom. It’s a small-seeming, compelling poetic manoeuvre.
There’s the wry environmental comment in “Ice Age Lingerie”: I am wearing Ice Age Lingerie, / oblivious to the effects of global warming.” And darkening descends, agonizing reality mirrored through pathetic fallacy, in “The Room Where They Found You”:
… I see you pulling away
after shooting up in the car while we
stood crying on the road, begging
you to come home. The vast sky
does not stop wild clouds
from flying.
Then grief, in “The Way We Watch for Her”:
We put her body into the ground. There
I’ve said it, the words, finally.
It’s taken me a lifetime to say
we put her body in the ground
and the ground wept.
But there is resonant love too, though shaded. In “Carnal Garage,” Musgrave writes: “Try to describe love – what other word / Might there have been for it? I know now there is / no greater loneliness than in its brief shining.”
In “Witch Gives Way to Woman,” Musgrave gives her own perspective, offering varied reflections: on poetic craft; her life’s arc; and her reputation:
- Sixteen in a psych ward in Victoria, with an important visit from poet Robin Skelton, who told her she was a poet and then published her poems in Malahat Review.
- A take-on of her critics and speculating journalists.
- Acknowledging her dramatic life and the tragic losses of loved ones.
- Comments such as: “I have been able to separate myself successfully from my public persona; I’m at home in myself and I’m confident enough about my world that it doesn’t matter what anyone says about me…I think my literary vulnerability is a disguise to cover my real vulnerability. The very fact of revelation is a way of hiding. But it’s not something I do consciously.
Later in her essay: “I don’t contrive to live my life so that it will make an exciting press release or sound bite. I do what all writers do—plunder my life experiences for my writing.” A reader of the wide panoply of poetry might take issue with this last statement—particularly the generalization “all writers do”—but certainly, for Musgrave, “plunder my life” is an accurate observance.
Still, Musgrave endeavours to separate, to draw a line between her poetic self and her public persona—or perhaps between her public self and poetic persona. Hair-splitting perhaps, but in her dramatic circumstances, the line is often thin.
In a poem near the end of those selected, Musgrave spots a mouse returning to a kitchen after being released to freedom, and imagines it reminding her that—as one of “us interlopers”—“wild and alone is a way to live.”
So, here in this book, along with Micheline Maylor’s insights, is Susan Musgrave amidst her ‘inherited’ turmoil and aloneness, drawing us in and sharing her remarkable life and potent poetry.
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Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling around with words, ideas, and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, influenced by experimenters in early Toronto days, often juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven-book poetic series fluttertongue. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions (Radiant Press, 2022). In 2024 The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall, appeared with above/ground press, and in 2025 with Lake’s End Press. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. [Editor’s note: Steven reviewed Mary Ann Moore, Sharon Thesen, and Jacqueline Bell, Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Harold Rhenisch, Kevin Spenst, Eimear Laffan, and Tim Lilburn for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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