David Musgrave

David Musgrave Poems

David Musgrave Biography

David Musgrave (born 1965) is an Australian poet, novelist, publisher and critic. He is the founder of and publisher at Puncher & Wattmann, an independent press which publishes Australian poetry and literary fiction. He is also a board member of Australian Poetry Limited. Musgrave was born in Sydney and educated at Sydney University where in 1997 he received a PhD for his thesis on the topic of Menippean satire. He worked for a number of years as a CIO in the Health Insurance industry. He currently lectures in creative writing at the University of Newcastle. He is a descendant of William Witter and Hannah Churchman of Boston, whose descendents include Thomas Pynchon, Archibald MacLeish, Katharine Hepburn and the poets Francis Goddard Tuckerman and Henry Theodore Tuckerman. He is also an indirect descendant of the architect Edmund Blacket. His first book, To Thalia (Five Islands Press), was published and commended in the 2004 Anne Elder Award; it was followed by On Reflection (Interactive) in 2005 and Watermark (Picaro) in 2006. "Phantom Limb" (John Leonard Press) was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 2011. Several of his poems have won major awards in Australia, including having twice won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2008 and 2012. His novel "Glissando: a Melodrama" (Sleepers), published in 2010 was critically well received and short listed for the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction in 2011. He has published numerous articles on Australian literature, including on Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding and David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. He has also written on The Black Dog and Depression (published in Tracking the Black Dog by the Black Dog Institute and published articles on Samuel Beckett and the Ern Malley hoax. His study on Menippean Satire in English since the Renaissance, 'Grotesque Anatomies', is in preparation and his novel Concrete Tuesday was published by Island Press in 2011 and Mishearing is forthcoming from Gorilla Books in late 2013.)

The Best Poem Of David Musgrave

Dew

None are more familiar with dew
than professional footballers. From early
grades they are used to running through
practice drills and hurling their burly
frames through rucks while the moist chaff
of wet grass under the winter lights
softens their fall, accustoms the half-
back to the slippery ball and writes
green cuneiform on wet sandshoes.
And they fear it in the morning,
kicking off the dew in the ‘twos'
because they ignored a coach's warning.
Half their lives are spent in clouds
of condensation or the cold heat
of a winter sun where even the crowds
seem like droplets on the concrete
rose of the stadium. In the final days
of their season , sweat-spangled on the eve
of their triumph, the ball on a string and their plays
honed, even the doubters believe.
And the last day is, once again,
already an aftermath: the ground's been shaved
and sucked dry by the noon sun
and the paddock has become a paved
and bristled hell for those who will
collide with it and pinion flesh on
earth, earth on flesh and spill
blood for the sake of the game. Possession
is the law; all are possessed.
And when the crowd melts into the dry
darkness, after that great red football's
booted between the uprights of the sky-
scrapers and gone, the sky bawls
cheerless little drops for the victors
and decks the oval with the losers' jewels.

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