The title promises a spectacle: steelworkers, a falling rocket, a seaside afternoon in Long Branch. What follows is a man on a living-room floor with two small children. None of the title's headline elements appears in the lines. The title may invite us to picture Al Ryder as one of those steelworkers, but that is only an inference, since the poem never says it. The gap between the grand title ("Omnium-Gatherum" means a jumble, a miscellany) and the tiny scene is the poem's first joke. It also sets up a mock-epic, in which a toddler's crawl across the carpet gets the treatment of a voyage.
The sea has not been left behind, though. It has moved indoors. The three-year-old "chart[s] the deep pile waters of // the living room carpet," and the stanza break gives the line a little drop, so the ocean shrinks to shag in front of us. The microphone cord becomes a fishing line, the Fisher Price recorder is "trawled" like a catch, and when the boy is annoyed he "drops his anchor and glares." Colour does quiet work too. He is in a "blue sleeper," and the girl is "pink-cheeked" and then simply "Pinky," so the children are almost labelled like a nursery gift set.
The sound of the poem matters most. The narration is free verse with no regular beat or rhyme, just short lines and one-line stanzas that feel like pauses for breath. Rhyme turns up when the performing starts. The boy's contribution is pure syllable, "all DA DA DAs / and Dee Dee Dees," which has rhythm and bounce but asks nothing of the dictionary. Daddy's contribution is the opposite. "Déclassé Sabellians / Limy-lipped Pelasgians" rhymes and gallops, but its words come from the names of ancient peoples and from fancy French. His other chant mashes together a ship, a hospital, a lecture hall and a kitchen: "Schooner with a hand crank / oncologic seed cake / social science vectograph with kidney chops and sage." The slashes make it look like verse pasted into the middle of the poem. The word "sage" also means both a herb and a wise man, so even the food list leaves a joke about wisdom. All of this is meaningless but sounds impressive, like adult jargon shaken up in a jar.
Then comes the poem's best line: "Daddy ain't done." The plain, working-class "ain't" cuts through all the Latinate decoration. It reads as the boy's exasperated view, or as the narrator's dry report of it. Either way, the father has taken over the stage. The boy was making music from nothing, and Daddy is making noise from everything. The poem lets the child's babble seem the more honest art, because it doesn't pretend to be anything else.
The last chant seems to comment on its own performer: "martyrdom is cumbersome / but makes front page." It is a perfect line for someone who wants attention. The poem then grants him exactly that, on a tiny scale. "In spite, Pinky bites Daddy's nose / and draws blood." It is the only physical event in the poem, and it arrives with no comment. After all the nonsense words, something real finally happens, and Daddy becomes a small martyr for his own show. The bite's motive is left open. It might be jealousy on her brother's behalf, boredom with being twirled to gibberish, or just a one-and-a-half-year-old's opinion of the entertainment.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It is funny, but it is also a tender picture of a family. It sets two kinds of language side by side, the wordless music of early childhood and the show-off vocabulary of grown-ups, and it quietly asks which one is more meaningful. The inflated title and the sudden blood on the last line frame the scene so that the living room carpet, with its two small critics, is what finally gets the spotlight.