Letter: Doing justice to a disturbing poet

Sir: Ruth Padel ("Exhibit A: pretension", 28 May) amply demonstrates the healthy scepticism of the English liberal when confronted with underwritten weirdness, but she hasn't done her homework.

Brian Catling, far from being an unlanguaged dilettante, is one of our strongest poets. He has been publishing remorselessly since the early Seventies. Don Paterson, reviewing a recent anthology, singled out Catling's "The Stumbling Block" as a "thoroughly disturbing little labyrinth".

IAIN SINCLAIR

London E8