2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
From the award-winning poet known for her bracing honesty and sharp yet
compassionate gaze, here is a new collection of poems that explore life,
marriage, addiction, death, and heart-wrenching grief.
If grief is the willingness to be claimed by a story bigger than
ourselves, Susan Musgrave writes, "in that / tender wavering, I let
grief in."
"Writing about grief or tragedy is tricky. Hard to meet it at a
heart-level without being effusive; hard to meet it at a brain-level
without being cold. Hard not to make it about ourselves. Hard to meet it
at a visceral level because it can take us out at the knees," wrote
author Carrie Mac, responding to the death of Musgrave's partner,
Stephen Reid, in 2018. Following this traumatic loss, in September 2021
their daughter, Sophie, died of an accidental overdose after a
twenty-year struggle with addiction.
But to say this is a collection solely about grief would be to miss the
whole nature of Musgrave's voice and sensibility. Wit is one
counterpoint; the natural world is another. The poems share a landscape
whose creatures, minutely observed, wild and tame--the winged ones most
of all--dance attendance on the helplessness of our brief and mystifying
human lives. Throughout Exculpatory Lilies, Musgrave's alertness to
even the most desolate places makes her personal sorrows astonishingly
potent; and her scrutiny of language, and emotions, makes shot silk out
of sackcloth and ashes.
