Wakeling’s field of reference is vast and, to name but a few examples, includes Hollywood films from the 1980s, art from Leonardo da Vinci to Nolan, poetry from Yeats to a select cluster of Melbourne University experimentalists, and periods and places enough to satisfy Doctor Who. A poem such as ‘The Renaissance’ references Mussolini, Chinese script, female genitalia, Bacchus Marsh –even the Renaissance. A few poems, such as ‘A Bull Crushing Steam at the Tomb of the Unknown Poet’, have more narrative drive, but most, like ‘The Character’ – which can be read as a critique of naturalistic writing – serve to undermine convention.

It is popularly said that good writing, and good poetry in particular, make demands of the reader. Readers, of course, also make demands of the text. Amid its calamity of words, Goad Omen offers humour, pithy appropriations of the colloquial, even understated lyricism. But you wouldn’t have to be a fogey humanist for this Hadron Collider of ideas to seem impenetrable rather than illuminating.