I took up The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon with some excitement. I expected a little more, perhaps; but I can recommend this volume nonetheless…. (pp. 139-40)

[Middleton's] art is an elaborate personal mosaic of "fragments shored against our ruins." Middleton cares deeply for "… things / their mass & contour / & all beginnings" ("In Balthazar's Village"). Objects interest him in the same way they did Picasso, and the poems often remind one of Cubist paintings; the artist views the same thing from different angles, and the work becomes a dance around the object, an exercise in perspective. Wallace Stevens is a precursor in this vein, of course, and Middleton's "A Cart of Apples" resembles a poem like "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," in which each stanza shifts the scene slightly, juggling the same elements in search of a new perspective…. This is the poetry of process; in effect, the poet enacts before his reader the progress from what Coleridge termed the Primary to the Secondary Imagination…. The poet sees the object once, then breaks it up into constituent elements and reassembles it. In doing so, he imitates God; he restores the image to his reader in its original freshness. This theme links Middleton back to the Romantic poets, especially the English Romantics, who developed the heterocosmic analogue—the parallel between writing poetry and creating the universe anew.

Perhaps the most attractive of Middleton's poems on this theme is "A Drive in the Country / Henri Toulouse-Lautrec," which takes the process of re-creation one step further. Based on a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, it represents not a diffusion of a scene offered up by the Primary Imagination, but a scene already once dissipated and recreated by another artist. It begins with the original figures "Drawn out of the bones of light / Definite figures, a few, ordinary."… Middleton proceeds, in true Romantic fashion, reassembling the picture from its own parts, getting down to underlying geometric shapes which are lost to the Primary Imagination in its original perception. We now see the "Interior oval, its yolk, / A yellow trap, the crystal sun chariot—/ Across the emerald cone, an egg, tilted." Middleton forces us to reconsider the world we have observed too hastily and with too little imagination. He would have us internalize the world, to become like Toulouse-Lautrec who "scooped up this other universe / Out of the escaping bloody mucus." Interior and exterior reflect and define each other, thus unifying our divided consciousness. Again, I am reminded of Stevens and his unflagging attempt to reconcile inner and outer worlds.

Middleton has a fine sense of the absurd. "The Gloves" begins with this image: "A pair of gloves on the floor / of an empty spacious institutional john." A few couplets later, he comments: "it seems, you'd think, smothering a giggle, / someone has been sucked down the john." This is funny and eerie at the same time…. The gloves, the deep image at the center of this poem, point to a region of terror beyond themselves, being signs, not symbols.

Unlike [Charles] Causley, who affects a simplicity in keeping with his traditionalist mode, Middleton makes few concessions to the reader. His poems are doggedly "modernist," full of private allusions and the disjecta membra of a scholar's workshop. We are provided with a marvellous tongue-in-cheek appendix of explanatory notes rivalling Eliot's addendum to The Waste Land…. [Like] his modernist precursors, Middleton takes his inspiration not from native sources but from the Continent. (pp. 140-42)

Taken as a whole, The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon is a daring and, largely, successful book. It [reminds] … us that the dialectic of tradition and experiment (or of traditionalist and modernist verse) remains as vital today as it was in the early days of this century in America when Frost and Eliot were pretending to dismiss or, at least, dislike each other. (p. 144)