Forcing the Narcissus

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Susan Musgrave’s reputation as a standard-bearer in Canadian poetry is
well deserved. Her opening poem hits a shot to the belly in more ways
than one, images and sensations charging into the brain as an unborn
baby comes under attack: “In the beginning when your heart wants to
sing ‘Wild Thing,’ she turns up / the chamber music ... shoots you /
full of heroin, Southern Comfort, / her boyfriend’s marigold-smelling
prick.” The feelings are strong, the expression powerful, families and
relationships torn apart in love and destruction. “The
Spiritualization of Cruelty,” she calls it when a man sets his dog on
fire, and a woman is raped with a pig femur. Poet of the personal
Apocalypse, the cadences of Yeats sing at her back, ever raging without
a whimper about raw wounds and hangovers that never fade. Unwilling to
toe the cautious line, she takes chances, experiments, pushes the
cutting edge, yet always remains accessible. “Let’s pretend we’re
in love with each other. You go first.” Only a few weak entries mar
her presentation—for example, “Stopping by the Mailbox on a Snowy
Evening”: “What could be more frightening / than living? Why
didn’t you take / a later boat to Vancouver? / Why couldn’t we stay
in bed / forever, smoke dope, talk dirty / and not try to change
anything? / Why didn’t we? Why?”