On Reflection

On Reflection carries two subtitles, second of which, ‘A Novelty’ comes some way to suggesting Musgrave’s refreshing wit. This collection showcases his inventiveness as he constructs in alternating prose and verse sections a portrait of the poet as a young flaneur, compressing the events of weeks into something like a day in the life. The poems are sinuous rhythmic variants on sonnets, elegantly sweeping along philosophising, gaucheries and indulgences of the rueful figure who listlessly embodies Sydney fin-de-vingtiéme-siécle Decadence. The prose sections interleave a narrative that connects the poems’ reflections on love, money, art and death. Some of the poems have the mordant bite of Andy Warhol’s Philosophy from A to Z and Back; poems on ‘friend’ death and on the dissent from which poetry grows are stunningly fine performances. Musgrave’s text is alive with wisecracks, broad jokes, puns, (‘making his bed out of procrustination’) as it moves through rhetorical high and low styles to portray mood swings between ‘negative optimism’ and cheerful melancholic openness to life. This is a genuinely innovative take on self-consciousness: it cheeks the character’s self-pitying hesitation to call himself a poet, celebrates his disappointments and listlessness, and neatly contrasts the ‘the poetry of commerce’ with what the poet-hero produces — in a word, a memorable production. — Michael Sharkey The essential guide to the hall of mirrors — Thomas Crosse There’s a Joycean feel to it — like Stephen Dedalus or a younger Leopold Bloom — as the reluctant poet-hero negotiates the non-events of his eventful day. Witty prose-poems in their own right, these picaresque accounts are further extended by the sonnet-form reflections of the protagonist, giving us a narrative that consistently operates at two levels of consciousness. — Margaret Bradstock