Just as it is hard … in Torse 3 to pin down Middleton to any one poetic manner, to say—for instance—that surrealistic flights of fancy were better for what he had to say than Dylanesque labyrinths of rhetoric, or the optical exercises of Wallace Stevens, so in his … Nonsequences it is enormously difficult—and in spite of the sub- or joint-title, Selfpoems—to discover him. The style is more consistent, a chaste, neutral, rather laborious diction that can tighten up where it needs to but is mostly low-pressure and very humbly painstaking; he toys a bit with pregnant line-breaks and odd layouts but never takes the full experimentalist plunge—he is most easy, in fact, with longer lines and fairly formal stanzas. What mostly worries, though, throughout the book is this absence of any unifying personal pressure, an absence which one suspects to be deliberate. This is not...