SOURCE: “Gift with a Will,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 1993, p. 26.

In the following review, O'Brien offers tempered assessment of The Puberty Tree.

It can seem that there are two D. M. Thomases. On the one hand, there is the poet of memorable lyrics and dramatic pieces, formally various, moving readily between tradition and modernity; on the other, a writer with a broken thermostat, his poems marred by the effort to force significance on their material. The two poets can be found at work on facing pages through most of this collection.

At times, the division between the products of a gift and those of the will recalls some of the work of the late George MacBeth from the 1960s and 70s, for example in the slightly dated ingenuity of the early science fiction/mythological monologues from Two Voices (1968)—“Missionary” (“A harsh entry I had of it, Grasud...