Beautiful Waste: Poems

Brilliant songwriter and lead singer of the Triffids, David McComb died in 1999 leaving behind a legacy of evocative music. Always more than a pop musician, McComb was a perceptive poet who explored and confronted addiction, pop culture, the colloquial and the metaphysical.

Collected and published for the first time, this is the poetry McComb wrote during his 20s and 30s when the Triffids’ musical output was at its height.

Introduced by renowned poet John Kinsella, the poems will delight fans of popular music and contemporary poetry alike. Beautiful Waste illuminates a hitherto neglected aspect of McComb’s creative brilliance.

David McComb was an Australian musician and signer-songwriter who formed the critically acclaimed punk rock band the Triffids in 1978. He later wrote and performed with such bands as the Blackeyed Susans and the Red Ponies. He died in 1999 at the age of 36. Chris Coughran is an honorary research fellow with the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His writing has appeared in numerous collections and scholarly journals. Niall Lucy is a research fellow in the humanities at Curtin University of Technology. He is the author of A Derrida Dictionary and Postmodern Literary Theory. John Kinsella is an award-winning Australian poet and writer. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the University of Western Australia.