[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 and trees
To coax a style from these disparities.

The idea is valid, but the verse is flat. Like the speedometer of the author's car at the beginning of the poem 'the needle point' of poetic intensity 'teeters at thirty'. But when Mr Tomlinson abandons his car for the pavements of his remembered Black Country childhood his inspiration stops teetering and surges ahead, as in 'Gladstone Street,' a poem describing how a once proud Victorian street wore out and was finally wrecked by its residents in the 1950s:

In addition, Mr Tomlinson brings to bear on his own remembered self a fine sense of life's little ironies. The two 'Portrait of the Artist' poems and 'Class' are admirably sharp and pointed. Indeed the lethal satirical comedy 'Class,' with its splendid jibe at 'the author of The Craft of Fiction', and the riotous 'Beethoven attends the C Minor Seminar' at the end of the volume lead one to hope that Charles Tomlinson will go on exercising his obvious gift for satiric and social comedy.