AustLit

Henry Darger was an untrained artist and a social isolate who was obsessed with little girls. When he died in Chicago in 1973 at the age of 81, his work was completely unknown. Now his work is hung in major international art galleries and his innovative use of materials places him in the pop art milieu. The poems in this book tell the story of his life.

'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 from the moment of observation to make transformative connections with emotional and imaginative states: the continual freshness of approach from one to another of these poems is a hallmark.

'Other poems meet human situations more immediately. The self, or some other, is substantiated with a generosity of feeling — and this becomes a startling quality within the strands of satire in some poems, notably ‘The Baby Boomers’. Generosity also drives — as much as an elegant form does — ‘Young Montaigne Goes Riding’. Those two extended poems are peaks in a book of exuberant curiosity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.