There is little doubt that of contemporary poets Christopher Middleton is in theory among the best equipped to lead an English team into post-modern Europe. Two important practical considerations stand in the way of his being selected. First, he is not naturally a team-player, preferring the accomplishment of dazzling but solitary runs and displays of pure skill. Second, and more alarming, he likes to make up new rules and does not really seem to care which way he is playing, being likely therefore to nod the ball with equal nonchalance into either team's net. Pataxanadu and Other Prose … exhibits more than ever before those cultivated eccentricities of Middleton's art which by turns fascinate, mystify and exasperate his readers.

Pataxanadu, the title-work, consists of twenty-one short pieces most of which seem to take their inspiration from European modernist sources, including Kafka at his most nightmarish and cruelly bleak, the...