SOURCE: Reynolds, Oliver. “You Will Suffer.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5026 (30 July 1999): 23.

In the following review, Reynolds favorably reviews Meadowlands and Proofs and Theories, noting the interconnections between the two works.

Yeats's “The Choice” is unequivocal: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.” Rhetorically acute though this may be, it rests on rickety premisses. The first option is an impossible ideal. The second may be attainable, but at what cost? An art-form brought to the dictionary definition of perfection—complete; exact; absolute; unqualified—risks the aridity of what Larkin, at the end of “Poetry of Departures,” describes as “a life / Reprehensibly perfect.” Life—incomplete, imprecise, contingent—is complemented rather than opposed by art: the artist's task is to integrate the two. Yeats bypassed the claim of “The Choice” by wresting poetry from the turmoil of his own life; the contingent...