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When the World Is Not Our Home
When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada's most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems illustrate an agile poet sifting the everyday through a fine mythical screen. They reveal a woman with multiple roles and her emergence as a highly sought-after Canadian poet.
Known for her rebellious voice, Susan Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death.
Known for her rebellious voice, Susan Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death.
- GenresPoetry
93 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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About the author
Susan Musgrave
78 books44 followersSusan Musgrave is a Canadian poet and children's writer. She was born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents, and currently lives in British Columbia, dividing her time between Sidney and Haida Gwaii.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 23, 2022
The legless man in the motel room next to me
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman's love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you'd seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn't know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be
next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You'd been
on the phone and I'd turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable - move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail - acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we'd made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body
had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cried. You drove
deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew
at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of the stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad Bag, then tote her to the park.
They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I'd want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!
She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting her privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.
* * *
Once we returned to my father's home,
the house he had lived in as a child.
He said he found it unchanged, yet
when I looked at his face I felt
it must have changed. He died just the same,
as if he had been caught scheming
to live forever. That day we walked back
into the breathing fields, the same fields
his own father had planted. And when he stooped
to strip an ear of corn from its cornsilk sheaf
I remember how I blushed, afraid
he would be accused of stealing. I was
much younger then, and always afraid
of losing him. That day, too, we went to see
the family graves. The new owners said
they didn't mind if we stayed all day.
The graves looked abandoned and I wanted
to plant something that would grow there
forever, wild things to rise out of our graves
like late-blooming stars. My father had brought
tea, which we drank on my grandmother's
fallen headstone. He said she was fey
in the old days, and told people's fortunes
under the giant medlar. I wanted to be
her way, and studied the leaves on the bottom
of my empty tea cup until my father took the empty
cup away. I saw him, breathless, going
into the ground that day. Unable to bear
the way his face accused, I was changed
by loss, also. But looking back
over that day, I miss more now.
* * *
I show him what he doesn't want
to see - love is a blind man
playing dice in a blizzard.
He swear these bright flowers
like words when cut will sing or bleed;
I believe he is only grieving
or that grief has a lot to do with it.
Blindness or too much brightness can be
the same thing. He says he wants to see the world
but lacks the simple means of getting there.
I tell him what he doesn't want
to hear - how I woke to find my father
forcing the tears that hung on my eyelashes
like wet gravel, how I felt the wind through
my rice paper door. How can I tell him life is less
than he imagines it to be, at the same time more
tangible than anything we know? It is
hard to believe plump bulbs sucked dry
as an old man's testicles will ever sing
or amount to very much. I carry them in
out of the ice-storm to the calm centre
of my father's room where, I'm told,
anything might bloom, it's no sin
to be surprised. In us grows the strange
and the wild barely covered by skin
yet I think how much thinner
is the membrane between myself and the world.
* * *
They had gathered in a field, the wild
woman they called witch strapped to a fence-post,
stripped but for her snow boots of rabbit
and a lemon-coloured scarf. They lit a fire
and watched her burn as their children
poked the meat off her body with sticks.
The men called to me, to warm myself
at her fire; one placed his ox-hide
overcoat on my shoulders, his gloves
of heavy sealskin on my hands. My mother's
eyes told me to be graceful, I had youth,
I had it all. She must have believed I even had
her man, who slipped his hands inside the overcoat
and caressed me as if he had been aroused
by her pain, and the fire nourished him.
Years later I could see my mother's eyes every time
I took a wedge of lemon between my teeth and sucked
the bitterness dry. I felt her scarf tugging at me
as her voice carried high into the star-pitched sky.
The old man who had once been her young lover
said he'd always believed a warm woman was god
as he'd entered me that night. Even where I burned
he still felt the desire to praise her.
* * *
I have nothing under my skirt
bu a whole lot of lessons I never learned
properly. The man labouring on the road
senses that, and waves a fingerless hand
hoping for a quick throw over the lunch hour.
Your life isn't your own any more
when a man like that can bruise his eyes
on emptiness, and leave you wanting.
In a huff I move from the stoop
into the house where my friends have laid
a feast around my body. It's been dying
for days and they've dusted it
- "she would have wanted it that way" -
with cake flour to make it look ghostly.
I don't want it, who would want anything like it?
I fume around the place for awhile
but there is no outlet now, there never was.
It seems a shame to have loved a man so long
who was the wrong man
bu suddenly there come a day when I can move
through a room without you. And this
is the day.
* * *
You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money all around you
on the ground, remembering how it felt
when he put it in your hands.
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman's love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you'd seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn't know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be
next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You'd been
on the phone and I'd turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable - move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail - acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we'd made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body
had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cried. You drove
deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew
at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of the stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad Bag, then tote her to the park.
They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I'd want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!
She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting her privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.
- The Moment, pg. 21
* * *
Once we returned to my father's home,
the house he had lived in as a child.
He said he found it unchanged, yet
when I looked at his face I felt
it must have changed. He died just the same,
as if he had been caught scheming
to live forever. That day we walked back
into the breathing fields, the same fields
his own father had planted. And when he stooped
to strip an ear of corn from its cornsilk sheaf
I remember how I blushed, afraid
he would be accused of stealing. I was
much younger then, and always afraid
of losing him. That day, too, we went to see
the family graves. The new owners said
they didn't mind if we stayed all day.
The graves looked abandoned and I wanted
to plant something that would grow there
forever, wild things to rise out of our graves
like late-blooming stars. My father had brought
tea, which we drank on my grandmother's
fallen headstone. He said she was fey
in the old days, and told people's fortunes
under the giant medlar. I wanted to be
her way, and studied the leaves on the bottom
of my empty tea cup until my father took the empty
cup away. I saw him, breathless, going
into the ground that day. Unable to bear
the way his face accused, I was changed
by loss, also. But looking back
over that day, I miss more now.
- When the World is Not Our Home, pg. 38
* * *
I show him what he doesn't want
to see - love is a blind man
playing dice in a blizzard.
He swear these bright flowers
like words when cut will sing or bleed;
I believe he is only grieving
or that grief has a lot to do with it.
Blindness or too much brightness can be
the same thing. He says he wants to see the world
but lacks the simple means of getting there.
I tell him what he doesn't want
to hear - how I woke to find my father
forcing the tears that hung on my eyelashes
like wet gravel, how I felt the wind through
my rice paper door. How can I tell him life is less
than he imagines it to be, at the same time more
tangible than anything we know? It is
hard to believe plump bulbs sucked dry
as an old man's testicles will ever sing
or amount to very much. I carry them in
out of the ice-storm to the calm centre
of my father's room where, I'm told,
anything might bloom, it's no sin
to be surprised. In us grows the strange
and the wild barely covered by skin
yet I think how much thinner
is the membrane between myself and the world.
- Forcing the Narcissus, pg. 31
* * *
They had gathered in a field, the wild
woman they called witch strapped to a fence-post,
stripped but for her snow boots of rabbit
and a lemon-coloured scarf. They lit a fire
and watched her burn as their children
poked the meat off her body with sticks.
The men called to me, to warm myself
at her fire; one placed his ox-hide
overcoat on my shoulders, his gloves
of heavy sealskin on my hands. My mother's
eyes told me to be graceful, I had youth,
I had it all. She must have believed I even had
her man, who slipped his hands inside the overcoat
and caressed me as if he had been aroused
by her pain, and the fire nourished him.
Years later I could see my mother's eyes every time
I took a wedge of lemon between my teeth and sucked
the bitterness dry. I felt her scarf tugging at me
as her voice carried high into the star-pitched sky.
The old man who had once been her young lover
said he'd always believed a warm woman was god
as he'd entered me that night. Even where I burned
he still felt the desire to praise her.
- Praise, pg. 50
* * *
I have nothing under my skirt
bu a whole lot of lessons I never learned
properly. The man labouring on the road
senses that, and waves a fingerless hand
hoping for a quick throw over the lunch hour.
Your life isn't your own any more
when a man like that can bruise his eyes
on emptiness, and leave you wanting.
In a huff I move from the stoop
into the house where my friends have laid
a feast around my body. It's been dying
for days and they've dusted it
- "she would have wanted it that way" -
with cake flour to make it look ghostly.
I don't want it, who would want anything like it?
I fume around the place for awhile
but there is no outlet now, there never was.
It seems a shame to have loved a man so long
who was the wrong man
bu suddenly there come a day when I can move
through a room without you. And this
is the day.
- This Is the Day, pg. 63
* * *
You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money all around you
on the ground, remembering how it felt
when he put it in your hands.
- The Sex of Money, pg. 72
January 20, 2021
I first encountered Susan Musgrave's work when I was a teenager. I believe I heard a poem recited, in whole or in part on Peter Gzowski's Morningside Radio program. It was one of the pieces in the book, Songs of the Sea-Witch, if my memory serves. I'd read classical poetry but had never really thought of myself as a reader of poetry. I was not interested in contemporary poets or free verse, preferring the language and form of poets like Byron, Shelley, and Donne to the seemingly unstructured prose-like poetry of the twentieth century. That said, on hearing Musgrave's poem, I do remember thinking, "I like this." Interestingly, I never read any more of Musgrave's poems until now. As I embark on my own career as a writer, I have begun to look at other contemporary, and post-modern (I hate that term) poets, and remembering Susan's name, I ordered a copy of When the World Is Not Our Home.
I read more than half of this book in one night, and I understand now why I liked her work then. I found this book difficult to put down--the writing is truly superb! It flows beautifully, and is naturally emotional and evocative. Read Rupi Kaur, and read Susan Musgrave, and while the subject matter may overlap, I predict that you will "feel" a world of difference in the quality of writing. In my opinion, Musgrave's work is far superior. It feels deep and genuine, whereas, Kaur's often feels flat. That said, some of the poetry in this book is difficult to digest due to the nature of its content. There were poems here that I wish I had not read. In some cases the subject matter is dark and troublesome, leading me to wonder why the world must be viewed in such a sad and tragic manner. Imagery of dead children, and abuse, both of one's self, and of others, is not something one wants to encounter, yet you will find it in this collection. One poem, in particular, about a boy who was beaten by a bully, and then berated by his father before descending into insanity was especially disturbing to me. I sincerely wish I had not read it!
All of that said, the quality of verse in this book is exceptional. One can tell that the author has picked her words, and how they speak, with great care, and with even greater dexterity. If it weren't for the subject matter, this would be a five star, plus, read. As it is, with all those unfortunate narratives, I still feel obliged to give it a solid four stars. If I had any advice for Musgrave, it would be please take your exceptional ability and apply it to poems that inspire us to greater heights, and greater goods, rather than to remind us of the abyssal dark that is already all too obvious in the world.
I read more than half of this book in one night, and I understand now why I liked her work then. I found this book difficult to put down--the writing is truly superb! It flows beautifully, and is naturally emotional and evocative. Read Rupi Kaur, and read Susan Musgrave, and while the subject matter may overlap, I predict that you will "feel" a world of difference in the quality of writing. In my opinion, Musgrave's work is far superior. It feels deep and genuine, whereas, Kaur's often feels flat. That said, some of the poetry in this book is difficult to digest due to the nature of its content. There were poems here that I wish I had not read. In some cases the subject matter is dark and troublesome, leading me to wonder why the world must be viewed in such a sad and tragic manner. Imagery of dead children, and abuse, both of one's self, and of others, is not something one wants to encounter, yet you will find it in this collection. One poem, in particular, about a boy who was beaten by a bully, and then berated by his father before descending into insanity was especially disturbing to me. I sincerely wish I had not read it!
All of that said, the quality of verse in this book is exceptional. One can tell that the author has picked her words, and how they speak, with great care, and with even greater dexterity. If it weren't for the subject matter, this would be a five star, plus, read. As it is, with all those unfortunate narratives, I still feel obliged to give it a solid four stars. If I had any advice for Musgrave, it would be please take your exceptional ability and apply it to poems that inspire us to greater heights, and greater goods, rather than to remind us of the abyssal dark that is already all too obvious in the world.
January 19, 2011
Musgrave's writing is so strong, but some of her images and themes are so cruel/tragic/intense that I had to put the book down every now and then and take a breather.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews