Christopher Middleton's Collected Poems gathers over half a century's inventive, brilliant writing by one of Britain's genuinely Modern poets. Here is an English writer, a European sensibility, of exhilarating originality and passion. His concerns, he declares, include the strictly articulated tension between Being and Nothing, the stance and dance of sundry creatures, the nothing as a gerund, destructive evils as force. We will look here in vain for a single 'voice', though there is unprecedented singularity in the sheer variousness of his poetry's worlds.