Microtexts (Island Press, $21.95 pb, 93 pp) is a set of aphoristic prose pieces grouped under the following chapter headings: ‘Poetry and the Narrative of the Self’; ‘Poetry and Poetics’; ‘Writing’; ‘Art’; ‘Reading’; ‘Critics and Criticism’. It is not academic literary theory, but personal and professional musings by a poet with five collections to his credit. Martin Langford’s poetry adopts a lyric voice which, to my ear, sounds variations on the ground-bass of a slightly lugubrious, melancholy tone. It is idiosyncratic and not unpleasant: ‘time we outwitted / behaviour, the sad primate life’ (from his poem ‘Lake Coila’).