Reviews

What the Small Day Cannot Hold by Susan Musgrave

_katherine_'s review against another edition

challenging dark funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective

Susan Musgrave is a genius. Also a sea-witch. She appears to be at peace on a ferry. She is a gravitational force. I’ve been in a room with her and when silent she has some of everyone’s attention. She walks like she belongs in the space she’s in.

What the Small Day Cannot Hold is a collection of Susan Musgrave’s early work, seven volumes in total, published between 1970 and 1985. Perhaps more importantly, published between the ages of 19 and 34. Turbulent times for anyone, but in those years she not only became an accomplished poet, but lived in Canada, Ireland, USA, Mexico, Panama, and Columbia (often in places with shorelines). She married twice. Divorced twice. She became a mother for the first time. She fell in love with Stephen Reid. 

Individually, the poems that make up What the Small Day Cannot Hold are moments caught, fleeting thoughts fossilized on the page. Reading them as a collection, the pull of the poet herself begins to become clear. By “pull” I don’t just mean the attraction she has for us as readers, but something more encompassing than that. She isn’t the moon to our tide; there’s more awareness to her than that. Musgrave comes through as a poet who is deeply aware of herself as a body in the universe: the pull on her, the pull she has. It’s there in the language of love and death, of moon and water, of sex and violence, of bone and tree, of rock and moss. These are poems that have been pulled to and out of the poet, not for us, but for and of the universe itself.

If you haven’t read Musgrave, or haven’t in a while, pick her up. Let her pull you. Get reminded of the pull you have.