SOURCE: Newey, Adam. “A Scratchy Woollen Jumper That Doesn't Quite Fit.” New Statesman 130, no. 4533 (15 April 2001): 53-4.

In the following review, Newey offers a negative assessment of Electric Light, noting that “the compressed textures of the language tak[es primacy over just about everything else.”]

All those grant-givers, Arts Council grandees, intellectual-wannabe celebs and assorted boosters who, every so often (usually around Poetry Day), crawl out of whatever piece of bureaucratic woodwork they normally inhabit to proclaim that poetry in Britain has never been more vibrant, diverse and popular should remember two things: that Britain's greatest living poet is actually a soi-disant Irishman, and that, of all sales of poetry books by living writers in Britain, the same man. Seamus Heaney, alone accounts for almost two-thirds.

Those two factlets spell a grave crisis in British poetry. The latter for fairly obvious reasons: because of its perennially low sales figures...