SOURCE: Maguire, Sarah. “Dwelling with the Tongue.” Poetry Review 84, no. 2 (summer 1994): 70-1.

In the following review, Maguire praises Paulin's blend of lyricism and “self-questioning” in Walking a Line.

Nissen huts, bungalows, carports, studios, bars: hardly a poem goes by in Tom Paulin's glorious new collection, Walking a Line, without some building or other being brought to notice. And not only the building but its living space, its social and historical nexus, its place. This architectural sensitivity is nothing new in Paulin's poetry. From the very beginning his poems featured the ‘gantries, mills and steeples’, the ‘miles of terrace-houses’ and the ‘strange museums’ of Adam houses and Georgian rectories in which ‘History could happen’ (in the title poem of The Strange Museum). This is not a history of external events or rote-learned dates, but a rich, complex history in which both subjectivity, and objects themselves, find their meanings in...