The Sight of a Goose Going Barefoot

As if Catullus and Jarvis Cocker had conjoined with John Betjeman to pen catty, racy, brilliantly-rhyming poem-portraits of an age enthralled with gin, football, sex and surgery, Dhuga's debut collection of poetry is a tour de force - echoing the formal tautness of Muldoon, the observational nous of Larkin, the mordancy of Eliot. Sinuous yet unfussy, hilarious yet heartbreaking, The Sight Of A Goose Going Barefoot pushes at the boundaries of our sentiments without succumbing to sentimentalism. It's no accident that this book takes as its title a not, paradoxically, both dull and extravagant, towards proverbs whose provenances, however dubious, point up the painfully obvious as it obtains in the banal.