SOURCE: "Brief and Bald," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4564, September 21, 1990, p. 1007.

In the following review, Mackinnon asserts that the short poems in All You Who Sleep Tonight do not give Seth room to express his voice and finds the book full of "humdrum sentiments and linguistic inertia."

Even the acknowledgements, dedication, contents and biographical note to Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986) were cast into Pushkin's Onegin stanza. This both suggested the form's infinite capacity and flaunted the author's virtuosity. Everything was swept into an aesthetic world, but such a world as could contain everything. Vikram Seth's skill was not uniform: The Golden Gate has bumpy lines and passages, but the poem gets away with them because of its narrative impulse.

The skills needed for conducting a long narrative are, obviously, unlike those required by short forms. All You Who Sleep Tonight collects seven years' poems, some of...