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Eyewear Publishing

Selected Poems

Selected Poems

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By David Musgrave

David Musgrave is one of the leading Australian poets of his generation!

Poetry that includes four decades of work and unpublished poems that have won some of Australia’s most distinguished prizes.

This selection brings together the best of his work from the last three decades and presents the full range of his achievement in a coherent narrative: it shows him to have mastery over many modes and forms and also reflects the wide range of his intellect and interests. Australianness is at the core of his work, yet he is equally at home in the Western tradition and his Irish roots as he is in other poetic traditions. His work has won, or been shortlisted for, many major prizes in Australia, including the Grace Leven, Newcastle, Bruce Dawe and Judith Wright Calanthe Poetry Prizes, and his fiction has been short listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He is widely recognised as a major talent whose work thinks as much as it feels.

David Musgrave was born in Sydney in 1965. He was awarded a PhD in English Literature from Sydney University and currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. In 2005 he founded the independent publishing house Puncher & Wattmann, which has since become Australia’s leading publisher of poetry. He also publishes novels and criticism and his work can be found at the Poetry Foundation, among many other sites. He lives in Newcastle, NSW, with his family.

 

"a reminder that humour has long been an essential weapon in Musgrave’s armoury, ensuring that his often complex thought processes do not outrun the average reader – who may well come to agree that David Musgrave’s Selected Poems is conclusive proof that its author is one of the most substantial and downright enjoyable poets at work in the country at the moment." - Geoff Page, The Australian Book Review

 

"The poems in David Musgrave’s Selected Poems are wrought, as all fine poems should be, from a deeply engaged and responsive imagination, one that’s also awake to language that is vibrant, resourceful and which is strung with clarity and tension. Musgrave meets his subject matter head-on, but often in a playful and surprising manner which gives his work an astonishing freshness. Varied in subjects and underpinned by a need to pay homage to our connections with history, culture, landscape, water, and the everyday conundrums we face, the poems work in unison, providing us with a sustained investigation into the weight and texture of lived experience. This book is a testament to poetry’s spellbinding force." — Judith Beveridge

"Musgrave has the rare ability to take you with him deep into the landscapes of the world, of the past, and of the psyche. You feel your way through the meditations, you sense the temperature, follow the peculiar eddies of thought and association – it’s a joy to see this develop over decades: a consistent vision augmenting and expanding its poetics. This is matched by an emotional range, whether world- weary, angry or wise: the voice is shot through with a sense of wonder and an intense musicality of phrasing – a contrapuntal flow. The imaginative range is startling and I’ve been re-reading the long poems in this Selected with increasing awe at the combination of confessional rigour with the sheer joy of invention and caustic wit. A major talent you’ll be grateful you encountered." — Luke Kennard

 

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