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“To Keep Everything Tender:” A Review of A Stranger’s Heart

San Angelo poet Laurence Musgrove, one of Texas’ favorite poetry teacher-mentors and most generous editors, has made for us an expansive and luminous gift of his most recent collection, A Stranger’s Heart. Texas Poet Laureate Jan Seale calls this collection intoxicating and honest, always “circling back to hope.” Though Musgrove has published many poems and other collections, the poems in A Stranger’s Heart seem the work of a whole life, reaching back to childhood and spanning much of the biography of “a man / Who fell into the line of men who / Knew who needed words and when” (74). It has different life stories in it, too – one of a teacher, a dog lover, one of a writer, of a soul who knows “stars shine because they are crying light." (71).

Musgrove’s “Complexion” is dense with muddy river water and the failure-feelings of whiteness we might experience as part of our living in this big border state. With an epigraph by John Prine, there are elements of it that sing like a folk song, but at the important chord changes, there are lightning bolts of silence in bleeding colors and a “long list of regrets” (103). That devastating poem is made all the more powerful by the compassionate one that follows: the speaker in “Metta Guided Meditation” projects a wish for themselves outward to the reader, that we notice “the air is happy to deliver the music” (104), that we hear the songs in our children’s eyes, that we be free. Meditations and sutras illuminate apt moments in the collection, appearing just as they are needed. Musgrove himself emanates empathy for students, readers, animals, and other poets, and so do these poems.

Another moving aspect of the collection is its ars poetica throughline. He remarks on our habit of art, the ways poets get “low on the crowded sidewalk / “To pick up the trash others let go” (72). He says, “We’re all in the mistake-making business… / Like deciding to trust a stranger’s heart” (13). The stranger might be him, or it might be myself or the speaker in the poem I want to write, which I am trying to hold together “The best I can / With ink and gravity” (35). Musgrove humbly acknowledges the challenges of reading poetry, how it takes “some extra / Gas in the tank” (39), and he thanks us for reading even when it’s difficult, because “It's so hard to start over, to keep everything tender" (101).