The Kool Aid Dispenser
by David Musgrave
ISBN 978-1763670150
&
Selected Poems, (Black Spring Press Group, 2021)
Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK
Having known David Musgrave and his award-winning poetry since 2005 (when he became Treasurer for Poets Union Inc.), having read with him at a number of Writers’ Festivals over the years, I was delighted to revisit the best of his early work in Selected Poems, compiled and published during the somewhat silent era of Covid.
The first of a number of poems for Musgrave’s father appears here, his early death a recurrent and disturbing preoccupation:
He has come back.
He has come from outside himself to assume
the proportions of dream, in a city of symbols falling
from deliverance, offered up to speech.
(“The Dead”, p.19)
When not in elegiac mood (and sometimes even there), Musgrave displays a quirky sense of humour, language play and inventive wit. These come to the fore in his 2005 collection, On Reflection, a portrait of the poet as a young flaneur, from which eleven representative pieces are selected:
Transient flesh and the buds of death
bloom on Mercator window-panes, rippled
in convex heat, off on the dark road
of the shivering heart of ugliness
……………………………………………
If it isn’t one thing it’s another,
laughter without end, enough to make a cat speak.
And, if the door does not stay shut, it opens
on an inside that has shrunk and an
outside that cannot be admitted:
gnocchi clouds float in a blue soup,
white noise in the television sky;
(pp. 23-33)
This extended poem deserves to be read in its entirety. Also included are the satiric “Minneapolis”, the wonderful “Lagoon” (which, from memory, won the Poets Union Prize, before David was persuaded to join us) and the full version of “To Thalia”, one of my all-time favourites. These poems are from To Thalia (New Poets 10, Five Islands Press). A small sample of its easy, but subtle and evocative conversational style concludes:
So here I am on an Erskineville verandah
under the airborne moss of a jacaranda
floating above my head at night – and still
I keep returning to the harbour, jagged
wet caiman snouting the humid plain
of Sydney because I can’t be anywhere else.
Thalia, I’m snookered in this dumb city
of brilliant hazards, and dull comparisons
……………………………………………
But one of these days
you’ll come waltzing in through the heads
of my imagination (Krishnamurtri)
and that will suffice to slay them in the aisles
and flay the cured hide of this city,
unearthing at last its pink nascent laughter.
(pp.49-50)
Another significant poem from this era is “Watermark” (from Watermark, 2006):
Never judge a book by its reader
unless it’s the kind that’s read by touch
fingers skimming down the columns
as if shutting dead eyes…………….
……………………..In another’s hands,
the book is something else. Hold up to the light
the note, the stamp and it will bear witness.
(p.63)
Moving on to the recent collection, The Kool Aid Dispenser, we find many of the same pre-occupations, similar laid-back satiric approaches, but up-to-date perceptions, especially in the poems including Musgrave’s son, Jingxi:
Whenever I look at your grandson,
I see dad’s face, but you’re the one
or several parts of one, who animates his rage
and cheek ……….How you would have loved
to see him, even in your last unravelling,
the way he pushes away my hand
if I turn the page too soon, or how
he will stare blankly ahead, ignoring anything
I say before slyly looking sideways at me,
then laughing. It’s hard to believe
that part of me can go on being, let alone
this tenacious chain that links to you, here
(“Letter to a Dead Parent”, p.5)
This is followed up, in a later section, with the moving poem “Walking with my young son I remember I am only a year shy of the age my father was when he had his fatal stroke”, a memory that appears to resolve itself in the shared involvement of the energetic afternoon.
Other Central Coast poems follow, punctuated with fine description and environmental awareness. In “Kooranga Dawn”:
The cool might of morning
deposes the night casually, like a government
that falls at a by-election as a trawler returns,
darkness dropping from its nets.
……………… Soon the mass
of water rhymes with the sky, then veers
into its own fractured thrall
as a brahminy kite thermals the gathering sun.
(p.55)
In “Warabrook Wetlands”:
It’s August, cold at the temples.
I walk home indirectly
over the footbridge traversing wetlands and railway
each railing like a tyre-iron
and under each path light
a loosening gyre of midges
(p.56)
“Koels to Newcastle,” a delightful Musgrave pun, revisits
the trees that come alive at four a.m
with plangent call after call. The koels come home
to call the summer in,
just like the coal which leaves here
to arc up oceans, dial up the globe.
A neighbour’s house opposite, “rippling upside-down” in the shallows of “a little inland sea/ covering half the road”, calls forth the comment: “It usually costs a bundle for a waterfront view.” (p.60)
Finally, “How I love thunderstorms” celebrates
the thrill
of the cosmic on a domestic scale:
snipes and spars that rend and boom.
sheets of light that leap into the night sky
illuminating our snug insignificance.
(p.62)
For those who’ve been aficionados of David Musgrave’s poetry over several decades, or those wanting to discover where he’s ‘come from’ poetically:
if it’s true
to say I come from somewhere not just
anywhere south of the imagination
……………………………………
It’s Lagoon with wind-tussocked, wrinkled
hills worn down to a murmur
that claims me.
(p.36)
these two recent collections will be a welcome addition to their bookshelves.
MARGARET BRADSTOCK is a Sydney poet, critic and editor. She has been a Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Asialink writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Her poetry is widely published and has won awards, including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for The Pomelo Tree and the Woollahra Festival Award for Barnacle Rock. Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher &Wattmann, 2024) is her ninth collection.