Cocktails at the Mausoleum

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Susan Musgrave’s Cocktails at the Mausoleum demonstrates, even more than her previous nine books of poetry, her incredible insight into the human psyche and relationships of various sorts. The use she makes of the many places in the world where she has lived or visited is equally fascinating. While many of the poems deal with physical travel from one place to another or with her response to particular places, the appended notes set the psychological stage which invokes poetry at each particular place.

Musgrave’s poems are so well crafted that it is difficult to choose specific ones paradigmatic of her concerns and style. In “Paul and the Full Moon,” she describes her relationship to “Paul”:

Several poems express an awareness of the individual’s overpowering “aloneness.” The first line of “Supposing you have nowhere to go” emphasizes the aloneness inherently expressed by the title: “supposing you have no one.” The poem continues in this existential vein but concludes with a slight twinge of hope:

The long poem “We come this way but once” expresses over and over again the persona’s deep need to love another person and her longing to fulfill that need. And who has not felt as nebulous as the persona of “Adrift”:

While all the poems are well crafted and complex in their thematic concerns, some are exceptional. The short poem “Cali,” named after the place where Musgrave rented an apartment “with a view of Christ” (a 50-foot statue on the mountain, illuminated at night), the canyon, and the river, is brilliant:

Here Musgrave captures a brief moment of intense celebration of life.

The Queen Charlotte Island poems, especially “Requiem for Talunkwun Island,” harken back to a different kind of human emotion than that of “Cali.” In this long poem, Musgrave mourns not only the loss of the forest brought about by man’s irresponsible “clear-cut logging on the steep slopes of this island” but the loss of the entire simplistic, primordial life.

But what I really like about Musgrave’s poetry is that I can read it and immediately understand the experience she is, in each particular poem, describing. There is nothing pretentious in her language. Her words describe precisely: the signified marries the signifier. There’s another thing that stands out in her poetry. It is gripping. Once I started reading Cocktails at the Mausoleum, I couldn’t put it down. She lures the reader into her world and holds her there to experience her life along with her. Although she takes us to assorted places where many of us may never be — Oxford, Mexico, Colombia, New York, the Queen Charlottes — the responses she affixes to each place are ones to which we all relate.