SOURCE: “Tom Paulin, Walking a Line, and Paul Klee.” Cambridge Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2002): 57-75.

In the following essay, the critic contends that Paulin's poetry in Walking a Line reveals an avant-garde aesthetic that, like the experimental artwork of Paul Klee, pushes beyond rational experience and political engagement to explore the limits of language and representation.

In Walking a Line my interest is in the dangerous edge of things.

Tom Paulin (1996)¹

I

Since his initial publication of A State of Justice (1977), Tom Paulin as essayist, academic, and poet has been described by critics such as Patricia Craig in terms of the ‘social criticism’ of his work. In his review of Fivemiletown (1987), George Watson refers to Paulin as ‘an uncomfortable, spikey poet’, while Kathleen Jamie calls him a ‘liberating critic’ and portrays Paulin as a poetic rebel and critical iconoclast.² What these and most of Paulin's reviewers share is the idea...