Terra Bravura
Terra Bravura
Terra Bravura, began as short text messages sent to David Musgrave from the desert on the way to Broken Hill. He later described their poetic form thuis:'The poems are terrific. Vox clamantis in desierto. The lines are dense and staccato, with a kind of pinpoint-accurate mouthfulness of sound - hard to describe, but it seems to me that the rhythm is what makes it work so distinctively. There are words that leap out at you -'the eagle, canopic on tar, atop kangaroo smear, thrown furred corsets of white bone, confetti of road crows chroming a black storm' - this is inventive, musical and harsh, accurate and rich, with a vein of visionary dream, which I like.' The landscape of feral goats, idiosyncratic human markers, failed fences, becomes the distorted and detail-selective realm of memory. It was written in 2009, when the poet's father began to lose his memory; it is an exploration of oral tradition, the stuff of generational infamy, the coming, by ship in 1855, to Australia . 'That sick green sea/carrying/the little stone/to the orange square...'