David Musgrave

Numb and Number collects together poems written between 2011 and 2019. At its core is a confronting sequence of confessional poems which arises from depression and includes poems on the death of the poet's mother. It also includes a number of narrative poems which range from a long poem in the voice of the former boy convict George Bruce in...

Mishearing is a companion volume to Musgrave's 2016 vers libre collection Anatomy of Voice. In it, he details the compositional method of these poems as 'mishearings' of poems via Microsoft Word 2003's in-built speech recognition function. The Mishearing suite of poems is accompanied by an introductory essay and an afterword, both of which range widely in his attempts to comprehend...

David Musgrave's poems are at once meditative and restless, elegant and sensual, with an energy of empathy that draws him to a wealth of subjects. They are in several kinds of free verse and formal constraint. Here is wit and melancholy in equal measure, with a dose of joyous satire thrown in. Waterscapes and landscapes figure strongly. Typically, they move...

Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. They slip quietly into low- to middle-income jobs and appear to want nothing more than to be left alone. For Cara Gray, they are first a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then the inscrutable target of her police surveillance work. When a bomb goes off at...