The first part of Melbourne-based philosopher, academic, art critic and cultural provocateur Justin Clemens’s long poem The Mundiad was published almost ten years ago. It was immediately recognisable as one of the most audacious and singular works of contemporary English language poetry, but I’ve desisted from writing a review of it since – as one of Clemens’s friends, I felt too close to its author. Now, with the publication of the expanded version – comprising the first part as well as a new, second part – I have decided to forgo my reservations. My admiration for Clemens’s terrifically rich and ambitious project outweighs my previous anxieties.

The Mundiad is a mock-epic. It reminds one of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, both in its skilful use of the heroic couplet and the sharp sophistication of its wit and utterances. And while much of Clemens’s poem is very, very funny, it is not simply an imaginative and absurdist parody of the discourses of the contemporary world.

This is the tale of the conception, birth and early existence of a fictional female character called Mundia – from the Latin mundus, meaning ‘the world’ – whose adventures include, among other things, faking death as a newborn to escape from the oppressive ontology of the hospital’s maternity ward after a bizarre conversation with a talking parrot in a dream. The poem is also a shrewd and powerful essay on subjectivity, truth and identity. As Clemens puts it in the poem’s last book:

So, if you’ll pardon an analogy,
My present interest’s in Mundology,
Which means, I guess, that though our heroine
Appears to lose as much as she can win,
Is great as tiny, smart as she is dumb,
Unyielding, flexible as chewing-gum,
She, in profusion of diversity,
Can incarnate what’s Same in You and Me.

I unreservedly recommend this wonderful ‘profusion of diversity’ to all readers of innovative literature, satire, philosophy and classical as well as contemporary poetry.

Ali Alizadeh is a lecturer at Monash University and his latest book is