It is not unusual to find this in Australian poetry, or to find mythical and spiritual elements everywhere, mirage-like, in the landscape: but Davidson takes it to a new level. The sequence ‘Religion: Road’ takes us from oil-refinery ugly in Kwinana, Western Australia through Canberra, Melbourne, and up the Hume to Sydney, taking in St Augustine, Homer, and Egyptian ritual, lightly and energetically.

 ‘To the Guide’, for instance, takes Homeric hymns, packs them into a car, and takes them on a wild ride, ‘nocturnes nitrogen-furious / in the rear view, log trucks punching through hairpin and moss / where you were a ute, tail-lit serotonin in cloying like fence fog / yet single-minded’. Elsewhere the brooding elemental aspect is put to gentler use in a lovely poem for his grandfather, ‘The News’, that radically recasts Roy Harper’s elegiac song ‘When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease’.

Importantly, he also has the ability, the wit, and the heart to be able to aerate all this with simple, observed pieces like ‘Skyshow’, in which bogans frolic at the Australia Day fireworks in Perth, or with a lyrical view of his baby nephew in ‘Three Months Old’.

But that’s not all. Nestling in the book is something vanishingly rare: a perfect villanelle. ‘The internet came,’ it begins, ‘created by porn / and unto porn did it go, / the next occupation from the oldest born’. But for us, lasting delight.