D. M. Thomas has divided [Love and Other Deaths] into parts. The first contains more or less traditional poems dealing with family deaths. Often moving and sometimes quite good as well, they partly redeem the horror that comes after. Even here,… obligatory modishness creeps in with its spoiling hand. In "Dream", for example, we get a reference to "my woman", a phrase that has come to rank almost with the ampersand as a species marker. But "my woman" is phoney working-class realism, a doubtful memory of a vanished solidarity. And what follows shows the author in familiar vein, boldly going where fifty thousand little magazine contributors have gone before. British "experimental" poetry, in other words, with neither grace nor imagination nor humour nor skill to recommend it. It does not even shock. And it is about as experimental as the wheelbarrow. (p. 866)

Alasdair Maclean, in The Times Literary...