This is fizzy, funny stuff but it has a rather melancholic undertone – the ‘scorn’ part of the book which revolves around the book’s ‘protagonists’, designer-label shareholders in DJ’s, whose affair ends in a Canberra version of tragedy, the woman leaving ‘on a whim’ to join a firm and buying a mobile, and leaving nothing but a scribbled note for the man who is left with bills and the kids. Gould’s men come across as sullen and resentful, and seem to express an undercurrent of suspicion for the career woman. In ‘Dugald’, the poet meets a ‘ginger fellow / in his natty red and yellow / polka-dot bow-tie’, who stops and ‘speak(s) of his divorce, / saying, she got the lot, of course.’

One gets the sense that there are too many Losers who furnish Gould with satiric material. I suspect versifying keeps in check Gould’s bile, and such strict adherence to verse form is the equivalent of the orchestra that keeps on playing as the Canberra sinks. One way out is fantasy: like troubadours Gould’s men have a fondness for idealised women – harpists with erotic finger movements, Spanish dancers and divas. ‘Just Once’ for example: a bride appears in an upstairs window in foggy London, and the poet is entranced, besotted, overtaken with reverie for the vision of urban life made complete and redeemed by beauty: ‘She is I see, a bride/who smiles upon that wet, inchoate street/gives it the ah! it lacks to be complete.’

This hints at ‘Family Values’, I think, though as compressed and self-contained a lyric as one could wish for. Gould’s anti-modernist attack on the Art Gallery set is predictable: they are recondite snobs who despise the common man (Gould compares them to children from some ‘coolly practical broken home’). The gentlemen, in contrast, are the rouseabout fellow ‘Canberra School’ versifiers with a fondness for the fermented grape, amusingly sketched in ‘Dactyls For a Pounding Head’, a mock heroic tribute to drinking with the mates. When was the last time you heard of a Canberra poet being thrown out of a pub?

Not that Gould is as serious about the poetic calling as his earlier work suggests. The point of lighter verse is to be serious without the appearance of it. The humour is mostly self-humbling. Gould’s an ordinary bloke. After appearing on a chat show Gould writes:

I glimpsed my high moral ground outfaced the cameras’ stare.
Fellows, I asked, Please take
your gear elsewhere
You see I think I’m happier
pursuing non-entity, my ego unendorsed by celebrity.

The epigrammatic poems about faceless bureaucrats, other poets, and the GST are gems. ‘A Goods and Services Tax’ is a timely squib, worthy of full quotation:

For sure, the rich will eat and play the more
than the foolish compensating poor
now the cost of glittering merchandise
stings appetites of roughly equal size.

Gould can also make something out of skateboarders’ slang and shopping mall ferals in winter, and the extended portrait ‘Quaint Manners at the Checkout’ is utterly charming. Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Darlinghurst Nights’ is the obvious model, and the debt to the Roman satirists, and to A.D. Hope and Pope is repaid with much panache and wit.