[In the following excerpted review, McClatchy offers a negative assessment of Ackroyd's poetry in The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems.]

Peter Ackroyd’s The Diversions of Purley is, in effect, a Selected Poems, incorporating as it does work from his previous collections, London Lickpenny (1973) and Country Life (1978). Whatever his other accomplishments—and Mr. Ackroyd is a marvelous novelist and biographer—his career in poetry has gotten nowhere over the years, and this representative view of it makes no strong or lasting impression. Frankly, his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Poems may be witty, curious, fey, but rarely pay attention to their own purposes or possibilities. Lines ramble or dawdle, preoccupied with splicing bits of common speech with literary tags and clichés or bits of pulp fiction and nursery tales.

And everyone heard the wrong story
my terrific love-cries
are probably for sale
the technician said, “these poems are a wounded fawn”:
oh the strange story of the quantum!
if I smile will she smile
no one smiles, your eyes
are like broken glass are
you unemployed?

And so on. No poet could sustain a reader’s interest in such stuff for much longer. So, in the drift of daydreaming speech, cultural flotsam and jetsam are floated, King Lear next to Tinker Bell. There is also the occasional plangent note:

all we have knowledge of is our own time
the shape in the water is your own
the pattern of fixed moments
falling away as you watch
we must wait for the collapse
before we can start a new life
indistinct now as the sky fills with wings.

For all these reasons, Ackroyd has been compared with John Ashbery, but that is like comparing a list of ingredients with the finished dish. The slightly garish effects in Ackroyd’s poems, because the touching moments have no context and the funny bits are all foreground, produce the same feelings I have while watching colorized versions of ’30s film classics. No doubt cults are already forming for the latter, and there is an audience too for this sort of poem:

despite this sorrow as fresh
and every-renewed as a tear
you are small and sexy I dig you
this continuing disharmony
makes for harmony, my dear
I mean it sincerely ouch
during the song of the night
as it is broadcast to you
the complete sphere of wonder
in the boredom of a scream:
the infant twinkles his eye,
blue murder, stairway to heaven.

There is, as I say, an audience for this, but it does not include me. I like a sweet daffiness, and a virtuoso turn of inconsequentiality, and leftovers of late-twentieth-century life popped into a stanza’s Cuisinart. But I can’t read a whole book of it. “This is the new age,” says one poem here, “where the narrator knows everything.” Knows everything but what to do with it. And one thing the narrator knows that a reader may not is the meaning of this book’s title, nowhere explained. “The Diversions of Purley” happens to be the subtitle of a book on linguistics by John Horne Tooke (1736–1812), the eighteenth-century libertarian. The book’s title is a Homeric epithet which, transliterated, would be Epea Pteroenta and means “winged words.” “Purley” was the name of the author’s house, where he would brood on the importance of knowing Anglo-Saxon and Gothic in order properly to understand English. Is there a hidden message from Peter Ackroyd in these facts?