In a long, penetrating review of Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been, David Godkin explores the strengths and weakness of Coles's style, which he defines as:"a poetry that is relaxed, fluid and variable in the way that good prose is fluid and variable, a casualness that is indispensable to good conversation and absolutely central to that peculiarly Oxbridgean sensibility that unfolds from Coles’ longer episodic narratives. Chatty, charming, “offhand” as Margaret Atwood and others ardent fans have put it, Coles poems are not so much pressured from beneath by the urgency of what must be said as preempted by the impulse to charm and subtly provoke his readers."
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