SOURCE: Potts, Robert. “Stand-offs with History.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4701 (7 May 1993): 26.

In the following review, Potts praises Paulin's verse in Selected Poems, 1972-1990, commenting that “Paulin has developed an endearing and effective vehicle for his political commitments.”

Tom Paulin's poetry, like his criticism, has been as much a questioning of national identity as a quest for it, a troubled Protestant voice finding its roots in a dissenting republican tradition, loathing and loving the kitsch Britishness of Unionist culture, admiring English literature even when exposing the less appealing politics which underwrite it. Paulin's own position as a virtual expatriate from a region of ambiguous political status and his belief in a secular Irish republic leave him grasping for “an identity which has as yet no formal or institutional existence”. In “Before History”, writing from the bare, sun-scrubbed room of the isolated self, he describes the way “the spirit hungers...