SOURCE: Matthews, Steven. “Protestant Vocables.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5056 (25 February 2000): 23.

In the following review, Matthews praises Paulin's meditative tone and use of aural effects in The Wind Dog, calling the collection “a vitally important book.”

Poets from Ireland have consistently placed much personal and political emphasis on the need to deploy form in ways that make their poetry consonant with the speaking voice. From Yeats to Eavan Boland, from Heaney to Paul Muldoon, this ambition has set a marker of their particular perspective on tradition. However, even as his attention here remains intensely focused on Ireland's divided inheritance, Tom Paulin's The Wind Dog offers a more radical solution to the issue of local voice than that taken by his immediate peers or forebears.

To this extent, the book builds on the advances made in the previous collection, Walking a Line (1994), which deployed its dialect through (often short) lines...