Black Umbrella has been reviewed for Event Magazine, alongside fellow Canadian poet Susan Musgrave’s Exculpatory Lilies.
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 . . .
Read the full review here: Gillian Harding-Russell Reviews New Poetry Collections for EVENT 51/3 - EVENT (eventmagazine.ca)