SOURCE: Mackinnon, Lachlan. “Uneasy Swagger.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4762 (7 August 1994): 7.

In the following review, Mackinnon admires Paulin's ambitiousness as a poet but finds shortcomings in the underdeveloped and suggestive verse of Walking a Line.

In his early poem, “A New Society”, Tom Paulin longed for a world that would be “unaggressively civilian”, where “an unremarkable privacy” would be possible; although at first sight eirenic, the poem's subtext, a partial reversal of Larkin's judgments of his own world, showed a concern with poetry as a contribution to political discourse that has remained a constant in his work. In Liberty Tree (1983), Paulin was still hoping for a “sweet / equal republic”, but in Fivemiletown (1987) he engaged more thoroughly with the agonies of Ulster Unionism, imagining how it would be to feel “like a dog / in my own province”. Political hope was thwarted.

We have had seven years to become accustomed to...