{"id":294,"date":"2014-03-05T23:18:34","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=294"},"modified":"2014-03-13T02:03:58","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T02:03:58","slug":"the-phantom-limb-reviews-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"The Phantom Limb: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Geoff Page,\u00a0<\/span>The Canbera Times<\/em>, 2010<\/span><\/p>\n

Although there are many excellent poems in Phantom Limb, David Musgrave\u2019s first full-length collection, the most memorable is his \u2018Young Montaigne Goes Riding\u2019. Although the 16th-century essayist and philospoher may not have been ambitious in the conventional manner of his time, the poem about him certainly is. In it Musgrave not only evokes Montaigne\u2019s buoyant state of mind, he also presents very graphically his surroundings, right down to the farting and defecation of the horses and the \u2018mist rising\/ from the fields, all patchwork, like our deeds\u2019\/ Montaigne rejoices in the \u2018Dew-shuddering trees and the clatter of stallions\u2019 and notes, among many other things, that he is \u2018happy to be born in depraved times:\/ for very little effort I am thought\/ virtuous\u2019. The poem is stylishly sustained for 138 lines of iambic pentameter, employing the demanding but productive rhyme scheme abcbca.<\/p>\n

The majority of the poems in Phantom Limb are short, highly imagistic pieces which seem to rejoice in their own linguistic energy and ingenuity. Musgrave studiously avoids standard poetic fare, preferring to zero in on those few things other poets haven\u2019t quite got around to yet.<\/p>\n

He also posesses a satirical bent, best shwon in his long poem \u2018The Baby Boomers\u2019 . . . Musgrave has also recently published his first novel, a satirical work called Glissando, a further indication of such tendencies. The poet\u2019s light-heartedness about himself \u2013 and much else \u2013 can also be seen in the book\u2019s amazingly apposite epigraph from the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, \u2018God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merchant\u2019. The joke, of course, is that Musgrave is also one of the two highly proficient poetry publishers behind the new Sydner frim, Puncher and Wattmann. And, of course, as everyone knows, publishing poetry is a dangerous business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Martin Duwell,\u00a0Australian Poetry Review<\/em>, 2010<\/p>\n

Phantom Limb catches its reader\u2019s attention by containing two poems that are terrific even on a first, casual reading. The first of these is the book\u2019s opening poem, \u201cOpen Water\u201d, a long, ambitious set-piece that keeps itself afloat wonderfully and introduces many of the themes that circulate around the book\u2019s poems. The second is \u201cYoung Montaigne Goes Riding\u201d, known \u2013 to me at least \u2013 from its appearance in Judith Beveridge\u2019s Best Australian Poetry 2006. Both are poems about moving over surfaces and both are poems about processes of knowing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpen Water\u201d begins with the experience \u2013 always slightly disorienting, even to off-shore fishermen \u2013 of leaving coastal waters behind and rocking on the heavier swells of the ocean, \u201cthe massive rocking \/ stillness of the deep and its sparking \/ serrations\u201d. The first shock is that the poem modulates to an extended meditation on the colonisation of Australia, post-colonially correct but beautifully phrased nonetheless:<\/p>\n

Out of this same illimited plain
\nthe British had come, wind-stung and flawed
\nand laden with cargoes of concepts
\nand shadows, things which couldn\u2019t be seen
\nbut assembled themselves, a ruling machine
\nintricated into the vast and difficult continent-factory,<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

These were the blood-lessons:
\nthat something which does not yet exist<\/p>\n

is not the same as nothing: folded deep
\nwithin ourselves are nuggets of future
\nand the shock of their dredging . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a kind of limited determinism expressed here which seems very Sydney if only because that city is always in the presence of the open sea which stands as a Solaris-like symbol of an open field capable of producing superficial structures from deep generative movements. The poem finishes by locating the poet on a vertical and horizontal axis: you can go down or you can go across. In the case of the latter you will be travelling either back or on \u2013 ie forward in time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complicating the weave of this poem is a set of references to the processes of writing: time is \u201copen like a sentence\u201d (which may also be a double pun designed to allude to the convict period), the movement of the waves is iambic and, in the poem\u2019s conclusion, the fishing lines are like a \u201cscrawl on open water\u201d. I read this \u2013 a bit tentatively \u2013 as a desire to implicate the observer\/poet in the poem, saying something like: just as the deep field of cultural assumptions generates surprising results, poetry is generated in a related way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cYoung Montaigne Goes Riding\u201d is written in the same, stately six-line stanzas as \u201cOpen Water\u201d and like that poem it deals with how we move over the surface \u2013 this time, of the land. Montaigne, the great documenter of the mind\u2019s meditative processes (and of its indissoluble bond with the body) prefers \u201cthe oblique \/\/ paths which wander and meander to the one \/ which goes straight to the truth\u201d. He thinks of his ideas as being like horses: \u201cSometimes they follow each other at a distance; \/ at others they glance sidelong at each other.\u201d It\u2019s this absolutely honest subjectivity which makes Montaigne, of course, always seem so modern to us. But I think this poem is really concerned with how poems work: they begin in subjectivity and are structured out of weird accretive allusiveness \u2013 and the poem is an example of its own subject. To return to the language of \u201cOpen Water\u201d, it\u2019s more a case of watching the shapes that the line makes as it drifts across the surface than concerning one\u2019s self with hunting the fish swimming directly below. It rather reminds me of Graves\u2019s fine little poem \u201cFlying Crooked\u201d which celebrates the poet\u2019s (in the poem, the butterfly\u2019s) \u201cjust sense of how not to fly\u201d. In Graves\u2019s work the distinction is between poetic thought and prose thought, whereas in Montaigne\u2019s it is probably between human and honest mental activity on the one hand and, on the other, theological or scientific thought.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These two fine poems set up something of a guide for Phantom Limb as a whole. There is, as the first line of \u201cDeath By Water 2\u201d confesses, an awful lot of water in these poems. \u201cBodies of Water\u201d is a fine poem, for example, which opens out the pun of the title so that while it lists the various ways in which we experience and move through water \u2013 as ocean, rain, steam, vapour trails \u2013 its conclusion reminds us that water moves through us: \u201cwe move from state to state, \/ water flowing through us, \/ we through water, \/ a consciousness, a breath\u201d. \u201cOdyssey\u201d is a little poem which cleverly establishes the hero\u2019s love as neither Calypso nor Penelope but the \u201csun-deceiving, \/ faithful, all-embracing sea\u201d, and \u201cPuddles\u201d is a nice celebration of love in terms of the way in which previously isolating pools of water can join, \u201cpooling our lives\u201d. There is a lot of water as rain in the book and, perhaps significantly, near the end of the book there is a sequence of sixteen brief poems about water\u2019s antithesis: drought.<\/p>\n

And then there is \u201cThe Swimmer: A Cento\u201d. Made up of lines from writers ranging from the Beowulf poet to Rupert Brooke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Byron and even Ovid (my ability to list these has nothing to do with a prodigious literary memory and intelligence but everything to do with the Google search engine), it is a kind of ultimate celebration of the act of swimming, of \u201cdisappearing into the black depths\u201d and of \u201cthe continuous dream of a world underwater\u201d. The title, assuming that the collage effect begins immediately, must come from Adam Lindsay Gordon\u2019s poem although that poem has a dark, suicidal theme whereas Musgrave\u2019s poem concludes with the idea of swimming towards the light. Finally \u2013 though I could go on at length about the appearances of water in this book \u2013 there is a rather lovely early poem, \u201cA Glass of Water\u201d, which begins with Cocteau\u2019s statement that a single glass of water lights up the world and then goes on to describe (straining every available double meaning) a complex composition in which, as in \u201cBodies of Water\u201d, water lies both outside and within:<\/p>\n

Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours
\ntheir reception.
\nOutside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors
\nthe exception
\nof city from sky, hills snug with houses
\nand a glass of water standing on the railing,
\nhalf empty or half full. In the failing
\nafternoon light
\nbrightening buildings counterpoint the darkness,
\nglinting upside-
\ndown inside the glass, and the newly-weds,
\nseen from outside
\njoining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
\nglide under its meniscus, head over heels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As well as celebrating and recording the multiple significances of water, many of the poems set out to locate their author by exploring the past, those \u201cnuggets of future\u201d that \u201cOpen Water\u201d spoke of. \u201cLagoon\u201d \u2013 another water reference \u2013 is about the author\u2019s actual origins in Bathurst (a dryish city). \u201cThis is where I come from . . .\u201d the poem begins and continues by examining the convict past, \u201cimpatient and impenitent \/ forebears transported for a brace \/ of crimes\u201d before making the crucial statement: \u201cI have inherited their future\u201d. Perhaps the central symbol is that the lagoon has been \u201cdrowned \/ under Chifley Dam\u2019s \/ green skin\u201d which suggests that the past is not forgotten because of changes in modes of living so much as changes in size and significance: here, one water drowns another. The next poem in the book, \u201cDeath By Water 2\u201d, takes up a similar theme, tracing forebears back through a great-grandmother who is the great-granddaughter of a couple, Mary and Thomas, the woman of which was the illegitimate daughter of a drowned American naval captain and the man of which drowned while trying to cross the flooded Cudgegong River. As the poem says in its opening line, \u201cIt\u2019s little wonder I write about water\u201d and it\u2019s significant that the structure of the poem moves forwards from the antecedents rather than backwards from the poet: it reminds us that the past was once a present which sets up resonant patterns in the future rather than being a mass of fact brought into focus by an enquiring ego. In fact one wonders whether this might not be an attempt to see things from a Montaigne-perspective, avoiding the clinical, question-focussed methods of theology (or science). As with all such enquiries, the issue of the extent to which the past determines us has to be faced. I suspect that in Musgrave\u2019s case there is a continuous experience of surprise discoveries: as in \u201cI find myself writing a lot of poems about water and then I discover two drownings in my family tree\u201d. I\u2019d describe it as a \u201cmild determinism\u201d \u2013 perhaps it\u2019s no accident that these poems make me think of FitzGerald\u2019s \u201cThe Wind at Your Door\u201d.<\/p>\n

Finally there is the book\u2019s title poem which, initially puzzling, may make more sense in the context of an interest in these \u201cnuggets of the future\u201d. The body of the poem is about an unexpected identification between an enemy and the poet\u2019s long dead father. It concludes:<\/p>\n

I dreamt of him the other night
\n– wood is ash\u2019s dream of being whole –<\/p>\n

and when I woke, the only clue
\nto what I\u2019d lost, like a tingling nose before the lie
\nwas an itch where nothing itched before,
\na phantom absence: the limb I never knew I had, excised.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although we probably should read this as a poem about the intimate relationship between love and hate, the context of the book as a whole encourages us to read it as being about people and experiences from the past which the growth of the shape of our lives makes bewilderingly important. When this happens and the figure is absent, you get something like the experience of having a phantom limb.
\nAt least that\u2019s my reading and I\u2019m sticking to it. It does help to explain the book\u2019s title and allow that title to point to this otherwise unremarkable poem. As a whole, Phantom Limb has a tremendous internal coherence, driven by its twin obsessions of water and the shadow that the past casts. The fact that it never foregrounds these in any way that appears poetically predictable means that within the consistency is a lot of variety. As a result, it is a really impressive book coming to the truth of things \u2013 like Montaigne on his horse \u2013 on its own, distinctive pathways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Geoff Page,\u00a0The Canbera Times, 2010 Although there are many excellent poems in Phantom Limb, David Musgrave\u2019s first full-length collection, the most memorable is his \u2018Young Montaigne Goes Riding\u2019. Although the 16th-century essayist and philospoher may not have been ambitious in the conventional manner of his time, the poem about him certainly is. In it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":469,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}