Central to the volume is the sequence ‘Smalltown études’, a series that guides the reader along Victoria’s Omeo Highway. Local life is referenced throughout: we see someone ‘blinking over cappuccino, the Herald Sun, alone’ in ‘Bairnsdale’; and that ‘The CWA knits, and the chainsaws grind at scrublines like incisors’ in ‘Ensay’. Disney complements his small-town portraits with ‘Collins Street, 5pm’, a response to John Brack’s famous painting that presents a distinctly contemporary Melbourne.

People appear ‘in short black everything’, and we see the ‘slaphappy hoons on The Force / belting the “ooh!” out of yobbos’. Local poems are matched by a tour of international cities: against the ‘starling-filled granite’ of the Bairnsdale sky, Disney writes that in Vientiane ‘Factories paint the sky petrochemical’.

Throughout the volume Disney re-envisions history, as when, in ‘Days rolled on like clockwork’, he deadpans ‘This is quite generally known. Some time ago … / it became a good idea / for fish to try and walk.’ Here the conversational tone serves to makes this already strange account of ‘ex-fish’ (i.e. humans) even stranger.

and then when the, a collection marked by exuberance, grapples with the world in playful ways. In ‘Man with missing antithesis’ Disney proclaims, ‘Yes to tennis. Yes to dictionaries. Yes to monkey wrenches’; this poetry says ‘Yes’ to the variousness of the world.