Christopher Middleton's work shows [his] way of reflecting the self-conscious seriousness of art and poetry. His new book The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon is his best yet. He has also been one of the most scrupulous of British poets involved in following the innovations of modernism. Indeed his work strikes me as having derived itself from modern painting as much as poetry. Imagination is used as an instrument for the precise measurement of observations and experience. Forms of writing are austerely devised to allow imagination its exits from mind and poem without distorting the accuracy of pictures and sensations as these are presented. His concentration is almost painterly in poems like "A Cart with Apples."… Middleton apparently considers it a moral responsibility to present sensations as much as possible in their own terms. He writes of nature as-it-is instead of as-it-is-significant….

But while he is inventive, and, in his new book, productive …, [a sheer relish and exuberance of language] simply is not there…. Something constrictingly intellectual, I suggest, prevents that. Indeed, that is the hallmark of the deliberating, over-deliberating, modernist poet….

"Le nu provençal" … begins

     The wooden shutter hanging open,
     sunlight commands the shapes around the room.
     A jug has left its ovals on a flagstone,
     and tilts a little, as if listening in
     to a kneecap or a buttock

which illustrates what I meant earlier by accuracy through the use of imagination. The lines have their own tilt of surprise and charm. Middleton recreates the photograph on which the poem is based, specifying almost invisibly a sort of "point of view", a conclusion about what has been seen which is not exactly a conclusion but left open to our own experience. That Middleton is able to use objects in this way, cleverly, but with no obtrusive gimmickry, suggests that he is a poet of considerable importance—an avant-garde poet we can actually read. (p. 80)