SOURCE: Mackinnon, Lachlan. “Seriously Thoughtful.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4559 (17-23 August 1990): 871.

In the following review, Mackinnon criticizes the “technical uncertainty” of the poems in Meeting Montaigne.

Adam Thorpe's second collection [Meeting Montaigne] has as its title-poem an account of visiting Montaigne's tower, now devoid of “the books he'd thumb through the summers / of the 1580's, in retired Dordogne”. What Montaigne “wrote on the rafters” the poet's “schoolboy Latin cannot crack and / rubbing my neck I reflect on decline, / not declension”, the faint grandiosity of “reflect” and the easy verbal slide are troublingly characteristic of this book. Reflecting that Montaigne's “thousand volumes spined his thoughts / in buff leather, smelling of a library”, Thorpe tells us that a library smells like a library. This is not news.

Thorpe is perhaps at his best in religious meditation. “Here and There” observes that “where the holy places survive / they do so under...