Cargo of Orchids

Literature & Fiction

Musgrave, Susan

World Literature

Random House of Canada Ltd.

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada's most vibrant and original writers.With her first major collection in ten years, Susan Musgrave displays a range of form and expression that may surprise even her most faithful readers. The quiet, lapidary elegies of “Obituary of Light” are set against the furious mischief of “Random Acts of Poetry,” where the lines move with the inventive energy of a natural storyteller, while “Heroines” wrests a harsh and haunting poetry from the language of the street.  Her alertness to the absurdity in even the most heartbreaking personal crises leavens the sorrow that speaks through so many of the poems. Sadness and levity interweave. The wilderness and the penitentiary reflect one another. There’s an underlying tenderness, though, whether she is writing about family, the dispossessed, her life on Haida Gwaii, or the vagaries of love. This is Susan Musgrave in full control of her powers, writing poetry that cuts right to the bone.

Origami Dove

Poetry

MCCLELLAND STEWART

The Charcoal Burners

Forcing the Narcissus

In Things that Keep and Do Not Change, Musgrave dances on the threshold of ecstasy, madness, rage, and desolation, and goes further, to life beyond the moment of extremity. Yet even as we are caught in the undertow of betrayal and loss, we are buoyed up by a terrible sanity that reveals humour and beauty in the shoals of loneliness and pain. By turns dark, playful, and edgy, these poems are informed by a mature intelligence. This is vintage Musgrave.

Things That Keep and Do Not Change

2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist 
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book 
2022 Walcott Prize Shortlist\nFrom 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.\nIf grief is the willingness to be claimed by a story bigger than ourselves, Susan Musgrave writes, “in that / tender wavering, I let grief in.”\n"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.\nBut 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.

Exculpatory Lilies: Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

Musgrave landing: Musings on the writing life

Reference

Stoddart

Finally a collected Musgrave for those old enough to have been there in the 1970s and those young enough to want to reexperience the generation’s wry optimism and ironic fervour. This seven-title canon reissues Musgrave’s early must-have literary opus and includes: Songs of the Sea-Witch, Entrance of the Celebrant, Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries, The Impstone, Becky Swan’s Book, A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury, and Cocktails at the Mausoleum. Originally published by Sono Nis, Macmillan, McClelland &amp; Stewart and Porcupine’s Quill, the poems in What the Small Day Cannot Hold reconstitute the lost canon of one of the country’s most vibrant and orgiinal national voices. Called the "foremost poet of her generation", Musgrave epitomizes the people’s poet, bringing to audiences starved for a new language of wide breadth of material startling in its intensity and originality, legendary in its myth-making and monumental in its primal power. From witchcraft to wilderness, from First Nations to the urban nation, from the erotic to the exotic, these poems explode typical expectations and haunt the reader with unprecedented dramatic appeal.

What the Small Day Cannot Hold (Canadian Papers in Peace Studies)

History & Criticism

Dundurn Press

Selected strawberries and other poems

Sono Nis Press

An enjoyable board book for babies and toddlers that introduces facial expressions, emotions and gestures of affection. In Kiss, Tickle, Cuddle, Hug, emotions are linked to facial expressions with an array of colorful close-up photographic images that showcases a multiethnic cast of babies. Perfect for little hands to hold, this is a board book to share and enjoy over and over again.

Kiss, Tickle, Cuddle, Hug

Children's Books

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Orca Book Publishers

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Books by Musgrave, Susan