David Musgrave

Mishearing, David Musgrave’s latest, most experimental poetry collection, arose from deliberately generated ‘mishearings’ of poems he read into Microsoft Word’s 2003 in-built speech recognition software. The software was by default ‘trained’ to a North American accent. Musgrave didn’t reprogram to an Australian accent, held the microphone at changing distances from his mouth, occasionally smothered it, and introduced ambient noise to heighten the software’s mistranscription. He read from the work of various poets, ranging from Dorothea Mackellar to Seamus Heaney, and an extract from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Making multiple readings of the same poem, Musgrave grabbed selected line transcriptions to construct each ‘misheard’ poem.

It is disconcerting how the author of seven poetry collections can ambush the normally attentive reader of Australian poetry with such a forceful body of work as David Musgrave’s Selected Poems, which runs to more than two hundred pages. Musgrave’s individual collections have appeared with various publishers over the years since To Thalia back in 2004, but insufficient attention has been paid to them.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign in this Puncher & Wattmann collection of critical essays on contemporary Australian poets is the prominent ‘1’ on its front cover, promising that this will be the first in a series. Given that last year’s Contemporary Australian Poetry anthology by the same publisher featured more than two hundred poets ...

To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.

Carphology, in case you have forgotten, is the ‘delirious fumbling with bedclothes’, as stated in the epigraph to David Musgrave’s poem of the same name, which is not about a pathology but, energetically though bleakly, about passion and sleep. The epigraph to the book as a whole is taken from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, fragment C1: ‘God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merchant.’ Tongue in cheek, but Musgrave does indeed have wares and they are finely assembled configurations of words. The poems in Phantom Limb often suggest, rather than explicitly display, Musgrave’s erudition. There is a communicative ease about the enterprise, if this can be said about poems that continue to declare themselves after multiple readings. In them there are elusive depths combined with surface pleasures.

Why do you write?

It’s not really a choice, but a necessity. Usually, it is the pressure of an idea or an emotional state that only seems to be satisfactorily released as words on a page. Sometimes, if there is a choice involved, it is in choosing not to write.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. A lot of my work originates in dream. Glissando began as a transcription of a dream I had longer ago than I care to admit.

Eighteen years ago, Gerald Murnane gave up writing fiction. At least, that is what the unnamed narrator of Barley Patch says happened to him in this new work of fiction, the first to be published by Murnane in fourteen years. It is tempting to think that this book might offer some kind of insight into what led to this hiatus in Murnane’s career. After all, if Murnane is Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction, as the book’s blurb tells us, this period of silence is an absence that should interest careful readers.