SOURCE: A review of The Way In, in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer, 1975, p. 184.

In the following mixed review of The Way In, Ruddick praises Tomlinson's comedie sense.

Certain poems in Charles Tomlinson's The Way In show the dangers of the freewheeling approach. His Hebridean pieces are unmemorable and the title poem of the collection, though it shows sharp observation of externals in its description of the way a remembered place seems transformed out of all recognition as the poet drives past its high rise developments and the smoke of demolition men's fires, refuses to carry the reader in to the muted emotional climax which its author plainly intended:

 Perhaps those who have climbed into their towers
Will eye it all differently, the city spread
In unforeseen configurations, and living with this,
Will find that civility I can only miss—and yet
It will need more than talk...