BOOK REVIEW / In brief: The Puberty Tree - D M Thomas: Bloodaxe, pounds 8.95

The Independent on Sunday The author's well-known interests in erotica and Russian literature are to the fore in this edition of New and Selected Poems. So many other poets are mentioned, imitated, translated, so many genres ransacked for their possibilities, that the mind grows dizzy. Freud seems to give him his most promising ideas and obsessions but there's a fatal clumsiness in the diction and rhetorical tropes ('I seek a Muse in my new word-processor') which reduces the interior life to a fifth-form riot in General Studies.