Tom Paulin is one of the most intelligent and accomplished poets to have emerged from the North of Ireland in recent years. The authority of his political imagination won immediate recognition in the mid-1970s (A State of Justice was a choice of the Poetry Book Society), and since then his artistic range has steadily expanded, enabling him not only to redeem the banality of civic life but also to envision a new order which marries his exact historic sense with the joy of artistic formalism.

Though actually born in Leeds, England, Paulin grew up after 1953 in Belfast, where he attended Rosetta Primary School and Annadale Grammar School. His father is a school headmaster, and a liberal. "In the early and mid 1960s--which is as far back as my political memory can go--the North of Ireland had a placid stagnant atmosphere," the poet has written. "In those days...