Gillian Harding-Russell Reviews:

Both Katherine Lawrence’s Black Umbrella and Susan Musgrave’s Exculpatory Lilies feature dysfunctional families and relationships in which there is love and resentment, hurt and a sense of betrayal. Whereas Lawrence’s Black Umbrella draws its title from a poignant elegy for the speaker’s father, Musgrave borrows her title from a line in a New Yorker cartoon by Michael Crawford: ‘It’s been weeks since you brought me exculpatory lilies.’ The joke is that the process of betrayal and forgiveness in dysfunctional relationships is ongoing. Both collections present poetic memoir with tableaux from the past interspersed with moments of insight that stretch across generations and the two speakers’ psyches.

‘Vows and Curses,’ the first section of Lawrence’s Black Umbrella, begins with remembered scenes and details from the speaker’s childhood, when her mother was unfaithful to her father. In the opening verses, the speaker recalls ‘every charm’ on her mother’s bracelet; ‘the silver/sound that chimed as she moved from room/to room’ is telling in light of the line that follows: ‘[I] [k]new what my father didn’t know.’ In one scene, the speaker is a child waiting at school for her perpetually late mother to join a parent-teacher conference. When her mother finally arrives, it’s after first visiting the hairdresser. She is there not to learn about her daughter’s progress at school but to flirt with the teacher. Here we can hear the voice of the adult speaker superimposed on the child she once was:

He rolls a pen between his fingers, his eyes grading my 
mother. A for long legs, A+ for pointed breasts, A++ for the 
pulse at the base of her throat, her full lips, her bright eyes 
as she accepts the pen he offers. 

In these prose-like enjambed lines, the mother’s physical attraction is presented in matter-of-fact details that also reflect the teacher’s ‘grading’ her. The adult-in-the-child, or perhaps the adult who was a child, sees that her mother’s person and appearance are shaped by fashion and stereotypes as beguiling as Barbie dolls. A few scenes later, the speaker and her sister are playing with Barbies on the landing of the stairs (symbolically between floors) when their mother comes to tell them that she and their father intend to separate, and they must choose where they would like to live. Heartbreakingly, the younger sister vows, ‘I’ll go wherever Kath goes.’

In ‘The Heart Wants,’ we sense the psychological damage that her parents’ relationship has had on the speaker when she meets her lover and would-be husband at 19 but avoids marriage for a decade.

I was more rabbit
than girl in those days, small game
sensing danger, twitching its ears, sniffs

the air, bolts.

The clipped verses dramatize the frenetic mindset of the speaker, who finds herself shy of marriage. Only through a prolonged friendship with her lover, after he writes long letters and phones long-distance, ‘dial[ing] into the heart of the matter,’ do they finally get married.  

The relationship, in which resentment is complicated by an underlying love, continues into her adulthood so that she feels she cannot abandon her mother. We hear she resembles her mother in appearance, even though her mother complains that her daughter is ‘[d]ull, no fun’ like her father, and that the speaker herself identifies with Emily Dickinson:‘We’re the same size, Emily and I.’ That the speaker now wears ‘a brown wool jacket’ (reminding the reader of her mother’s ‘camel-wool/coat’ that now hangs in her closet) to keep her daughter company waiting for a car to be fixed suggests a relationship that is eradicable no matter the difficulties. 

By contrast, the speaker’s relationship with her father is marked by a healthier love and respect: ‘He caused me into//something. I mean I was really/something in his eyes. My sister, too.’ With all the ambiguity inherent in human feeling, the metonymic image of the ‘black umbrella’ (of the title poem) suggests the gloom standing under the ‘black umbrella’ that holds off a torrent of sorrow and regret following an unspecified death—perhaps it is the speaker’s father or, on second thought, the cumulation of both parents’ deaths.  

 Similarly, in Musgrave’s Exculpatory Lilies, feelings of love and betrayal haunt the speaker after a dysfunctional relationship with her husband, the writer Stephen Reid, who spent years in prison for bank robberies. In glimpses, we see the complex man, loving but intensely troubled. ‘You swore your life had never been/more than a long preparation for the leaving of it’ the speaker says to him, ‘how could I /have saved you, so.’ In ‘Whatever Gets in the Way,’ a poem dedicated to Reid, Musgrave contemplates her husband’s way of thinking whereby obstacles and love must both be embraced:

…The Kwuna trembles, water breaks
over her bow. Love what gets in the way, you say, we must
love every obstacle. 

‘Love’ in ‘love what gets in the way’ taken as a verb suggests that the speaker embraces obstacles, but taken as a noun ‘love’ becomes the obstacle that must also be embraced. She contrasts her husband’s loving approach with that of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (the couple had recently watched the Netflix show Narcos). According to the show, when his daughter asked for a unicorn, Escobar ‘bought a horse, instead, stapled a cone to its head,/attached wings to the withers: the horse died of an infection.’ Escobar, after all, ‘killed/whatever got in his way.’ In a shrewd turn, Musgrave then comments on the drug lord’s having burned bundles of cash in a fire to keep his family warm, and adds, ‘I like that in a man.’ Here is a poet who can startle us with the unexpected turns in her thought as she disentangles the contradictions within the wholecloth of experience to make her point. 

In the second section ‘The Goodness of This World,’ we see the speaker’s naive goodness and trust that things will work out present in her relationship with their daughter, who becomes addicted to drugs. Although most people consider death ‘a one-way street,’ the daughter has inherited her father’s risk-taking nature and believes she ‘can sneak back up on it /while the traffic is light.’ Both everyday and ordinary, the metaphor is incisive in the context.

Like her father in his warmth of personality and good intentions, the girl assures her mother on Facebook that she loves her and that she is still alive; when locked out from the house, she smashes a window so that she and an orange cat she found at the dumpster can get inside to watch cartoons on TV. The mother’s closing lyrical lines—‘You were always like a small bird/ in an unexpected winter, your beauty/and mercy flying so high above us on this earth’—suggest a love for this daughter who seems to be constitutionally unable to take care of herself. There is a conversational ease and intimacy to Musgrave’s verse that, along with its often provocative subject matter, becomes the hallmark of her poetry.

Most moving is the scene where the mother comes across the sleeping daughter who, afraid of the dark, has brought her lamp into bed with her, burning a part of her comforter and pillow. ‘The fire could have/consumed us both, my love’ is almost cheerful, in consideration that the girl, at least, ‘would have gone on/sleeping.’ 

The last three sections of Exculpatory Lilies, while less sequential and suggestive of a narrative, include poems that echo themes that occur in the first two sections. Some memorable poems include ‘To My Critics,’ in which the speaker makes fun of herself and her critics. The elegy for poet Al Purdy, Musgrave’s friend who chose assisted dying, is exceedingly moving as she leaves us with her impression that death ‘that day/was the sound of one cold hand clapping.’ As the final knot in the knitting that holds this intricate collection together, the last poem ‘Hunger’ brings us back to the speaker’s sorrow on her daughter’s death, which, in its turn, echoes the death of her husband: ‘The emptiest days are loveliest; only/people with desires can be fooled,/and I have none.’ And so, the speaker believes she has reached a quietus, at least through her life’s work as a writer.

Written with love and angst, Black Umbrella and Exculpatory Lilies are poetry collections that contain drama as well as moments of lyrical beauty and hard-headed wisdom. To Musgrave’s collection, there’s an added dash of self-irony and black humour. While Lawrence’s poems often arise from select details, whether a ‘camel-wool coat,’ a ‘red plaid blanket’ or a ‘black umbrella,’ Musgrave’s poetry is rooted in conversational phrases and natural observation interpolated with startling metaphors drawn from nature and everyday living. Both collections are page-turners that engage the reader early and alight on many truthful moments.  

—gillian harding-russell