SOURCE: “Mask and Passions,” in Poetry, Vol. CLIV, No. 1, April, 1989, pp. 29-48.

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...