The Balcony Tree

Middleton ( The Pursuit of the Kingfisher ) has been teaching in the U.S. since 1965, but his poetry continues to originate from a decidedly British sensibility. Due to gaps in culture, his attempts to record everyday events (a couple parting at a train station, walking the dog, a new neighbor) take on a staid quality, helped neither by his British spellings nor by uniform-length stanzas. Archaic grammar seems incongruous with the poems' insignificant surface. ``But into you I leaned / And felt a trembling go / From all my body out / Into your sudden sleep,'' he says, recalling a tender moment. More accessible, and decidedly more interesting, than the majority of poems here are nine surreal prose pieces that form the book's final section. Intimate and vividly detailed, these ironic accounts seem lifted from a historical chamber of horrors: the funeral of a clown during Russian-Polish strife in 1920, soldiers in 1939 encamped by the sea, the importance that Turkish peasants attach to sleeping on their roofs. Both less formal and more imaginative, these closing works accomplish what the poems fail to achieve, turning trivialities into portents. (Dec.)