“Tom Paulin’s new book is the latest in a series of bluffer’s guides to poetry which have recently fallen from the press, one of them, I must confess, by myself. Paulin has a passion for language and a marvellously sensitive ear for its textures and cadences. In fact, he reads so closely, slowing a poem down to a sort of surreal slow-motion, that it becomes in his hands a strange cacophony of plosive, guttural and sibilant noises.” But “you can, in short, read too closely, just as you can squash your nose up against a canvas until the painting fades to a blur.”