This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town's defining modern disaster - the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands - becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down.
But while patriarchy flounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian's eye to bear on both the city's and our society's efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe's flotsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reflected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax - poems which resist any stasis of the imagination.
The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Denfiends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert's merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior's later trade of precision engineer, it fits together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.