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Iggy Mc Goven's The King of Suburbia came my way recently and I'm having mixed feeling towards it. Some work like, Necking at the reading, comes across as purile frat-boyesque titillation - and elsewhere in First lessons Mc Govern recalls the strategic dropping of pencils " by Miss's desk to peep at her underwear". Such work all adds up in this readers mind, to a sad middle age store of banal erotica, a closet of sticky midlife poems. The Glove in particular, while claiming to be the act of a kind father cleaning his son's car, comes across as a creepy act of surveillance, and violation of privacy "keeping a wary eye for E and the cold comfort of condom wrapper". Ironically this is perhaps a strength of the collection. It's a light bo-home-ian rather than bohemian romp through suburbia. With joggers, skips, venetian blinds, and Luas bridges, accompanying it, we seen unveiled before us, the less than alluring lifestyle of a middleclass denizen of Dublin. In general though, the light, humorous, and nonchalant nature of many of the poems, will get a chuckle. In doing so, Mc Govern leaves no banality unturned in search of pun (For "Armagh" read "Armani") or quip:

Quick brown urban fox
jumps over the lazy dog
barking all damn night

But time should be allowed before a second reading. In From the Greek for example, the smile raising "no man steps twice into the same flea-pit twice" ironically turns on itself, and like much light comedy, seems jaded if you look at it again too soon. Moreover, not all the jokes work. In View from Dundrum, Mc Govern makes a bizarre comment, which left me puzzling. A "Chinese takeout place" declares Mc Govern is "inscrutably named the Great Wall". Quite why exactly such a name is deemed inscrutable escapes all analysis, and Mc Govern's example of an imagined pub "inscrutably named" The Great Hunger in Tiananmen Square, does not really save the poem - even if you get what he was driving at. The joke falls flat on it's face. Tumbleweed blows through it.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton's Bout-Rimes shows Mc Govern at his most artful. It's a homage to the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton who immortalised himself and along the Royal Canal Dublin, by carving his famous equation into Bougham Bridge. Using Kavanagh's Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Mc Govern, melts the end words of each line of the Monaghan man's verse into the end of each line of his own, He even manages to work Athy into the verse by dressing it in 'empathy'. A classic Bout-Rime if ever there was one, because it's working on multiple levels.

Hamilton's work of course makes ideal subject matter for an Associate professor of Physics like Mc Govern, but more so because Hamilton did 'versify' himself. But despite this display of cleverness, there is a sense of missed opportunity. The relationship between mathematics and poetry in the work of the two men, remains disappointingly unexplored here. But given the goal of the poem was most likely the creation of a bout-rime rather than the exploration of such an idea, then we can not hold the poet to task. But still, it seems a shame. Finally Mc Govern's charge of "graffiti wasted on the passer by", seems nothing other than intellectual snobbery, and perhaps is disproved by the picture here of a one Tevian Gray adding his own algebraic structure 'the octonions' to Bougham bridge. You'll find a poem of Hamilton's own, on the same page.

Available from Dedalus.