SOURCE: "Tomlinson Stands Up," in The Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1992, p. 19.

In the following mixed review of The Door in the Wall, Potts explores Tomlinson's continued interest in landscape.

Charles Tomlinson's poetry has benefited, perhaps perversely, from his frustrated interest in a career in cinema and his often frustrating progress as an artist, and almost fulfils that vexatious Horatian dictum, ut pictura poesis. Firmly categorized now as a poet of landscape, Tomlinson has for over forty years produced his careful, Impressionist pieces, combining a painter's precision and sensitivity with the cinematic facility for recording the passage of time. Whether in the free verse which formerly suited him so well for Mexican and American vistas, or in the more formal metres which he handles with extraordinary fluency, Tomlinson continues, in The Door in the Wall, to concentrate on the minute details of change and flux in landscape, which are...