Christopher Middleton's work shows [his] way of reflecting the self-conscious seriousness of art and poetry. His new book The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon is his best yet. He has also been one of the most scrupulous of British poets involved in following the innovations of modernism. Indeed his work strikes me as having derived itself from modern painting as much as poetry. Imagination is used as an instrument for the precise measurement of observations and experience. Forms of writing are austerely devised to allow imagination its exits from mind and poem without distorting the accuracy of pictures and sensations as these are presented. His concentration is almost painterly in poems like "A Cart with Apples."… Middleton apparently considers it a moral responsibility to present sensations as much as possible in their own terms. He writes of nature as-it-is instead of as-it-is-significant….

But while he is inventive...