In "Small Action Poem" (1966) Charles Tomlinson introduces Chopin "shaking music from the fingers". Chopin's art was second nature to him. Tomlinson is not that sort of artist. He is to an unusual degree fastidious. In The Shaft … there are poems which he characterizes as "bagatelles"—a genre he has frequently exploited, most memorably in American Scenes (1966) which gives the lie to those critics who dismiss him as "humourless". Tomlinson's humour is broad, short on fashionable local wit but rich in human observation. Yet the bagatelles are marginal in Tomlinson's work. At the centre is not anecdote but an acute perception of a common world with a history, a world of movement and process—two of his favourite words. The poetry is as much about perception as about the things perceived. Variety of experience is reflected in a variety of forms, tones and techniques which must strike anyone who...