SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Free to Roam.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 312 (22 July 1994): 44.

In the following review, Lucas lauds Paulin's playful use of typography, language, and aural effects in Walking a Line.

“To be one self is not to be.” The melancholy wit of Pessoa's remark anticipates by half-a-century one of the cherished commonplaces of postmodernism. But Pessoa knew what he was about when he farmed out his poems between four different personae. Each of them takes a line. By contrast, postmodernist writing inevitably toes the line of collapsed narrative, of author(ity). It's writing made for, and by, the computer: cut-and-paste, touch-of-a-button rearrangement.

I don't suppose Tom Paulin has ever been accused of toeing the line. He can, though, take it, as several poems in Walking a Line show (the viciously witty “The Other England”, for example, about the ghastliness of the royals).

He also candidly acknowledges the...