What happens in Michael Haslam's poems is always unusual, unexpected, whole. It is not possible to characterise his work by a brief extract, but only to quote one of his aphorisms. The pool has been a recurrent image, metaphor and emblem in his poetry. This book was intended to be a Collected Poems - his published work has hitherto been scattered among smaller presses. But collecting involved revising, recomposing, balancing, to contain and to extend. The poet comes up as a clown, with the world of nature, gala balloons, a string of sausages from the jacket pocket, the fruits of Cornucopia, sexual intercourse, childbirth, floods of tears, etc., as one approximation to A Whole Bauble.