Sydney, 19 April 2024: A packed audience gathered at the Friends Room at the State Library of NSW last week to celebrate the poetry of Dr Penelope Layland and Dr David Musgrave as part of our Ramsay Writers Series.
The Ramsay Writers Series is a Centre initiative designed to showcase established and emerging Australian writers. At each event, noteworthy writers read from their own work, as well as offering perspectives on influential past works. For the second year in a row the series is focussing on Australian poets.
In addition to Dr Layland and Dr Musgrave, the Centre was privileged to be joined by State Librarian Dr Caroline Butler-Bowdon, our regular special guest poet Luke Whitington, renowned poet Todd Turner, Ramsay Scholars, poetry lovers and aspiring writers.
Dr Penelope Layland is a poet and editor, with a past life as a journalist and speechwriter, who divides her time between the ACT and Tasmania. Her poetry books have twice been short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Award in The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and twice shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year.
She is a three-time poetry winner of the ACT Writers Centre’s annual book awards and her most recent book, Beloved, an extended suite of poems in the voice of the 19th-century diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, was published in 2022.
Dr Layland spoke of how she was drawn to write poetry in the imagined voice of William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy after walking through the Lake District in the UK and visiting Dove Cottage, where Dorothy lived with William in the final year of the 18th century. She became fascinated by Dorothy’s role in William’s life and poetry, and their intense and passionate relationship ‘trying to repair a rupture that had occurred almost 20 years earlier when their mother died and Dorothy was sent to live with relatives while William and his brothers remained with their father’.
Dr Layland read William Wordsworth’s poems Among All Lovely Things My Love Had Been and Foresight as well as her own poems from Beloved that detailed the changing of Dorothy’s and William Wordsworth’s relationship when William married, Dorothy’s aging and physical changes including the loss of her teeth, and Dorothy’s affection for William’s children whom she helped raise.
Dr David Musgrave is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Mishearing (2023), Selected Poems (UK, 2021), and The Kool-Aid Dispenser (due October 2024). He has published one novel, Glissando (2010) and another The Obituary Collector, is forthcoming. Dr Musgrave has also published a critical monograph, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance (2014) and co-edited the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016).
In 2005 Dr Musgrave founded the publishing house Puncher & Wattmann, now Australia’s leading poetry publisher. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and translates classical Chinese poetry; a collection of translations of the Imperial Civil Service test poems from the Tang Dynasty is due in 2025.
At the event Dr Musgrave read the poem On the Birth of a Son, by Su Shi, a Chinese poet, writer, artist and statesman during China’s Song era, as well as some verses by romantic 18th century English poet Alexander Pope. From his own collections, he delighted the audience with a range of poetry from powerful eulogies to comical poems, one based on a true ‘incident’ from his university days. The poems he read included Letter to a Dead Parent, Five Puddles, The Excursion, Achtung Baby, Kooragang Dawn, Making Northrop Frye Laugh, The Poet’s Wake, Halfway Things, Anatomy of Voice, Shy Architecture, Parthenope and Lycranthropy.
Ramsay Centre CEO Professor Simon Haines ended the event with a reading from Epaminondas by leading Brazillian poet Marco Catalão translated by Chris Miller.
If you wish to be invited to future Ramsay Writers Events email ramsayevents@ramsaycentre.org
Media contact: Sarah Switzer 0407 816 098/ sarah.switzer@ramsaycentre.org