[6] It's clear that the love of the beautiful game extends to Wilkinson's poetics, for he embraces a variety of forms and modes of address.
Something Wilkinson does well is navigate the dark abyss of clinical depression [...] from "going about / the tedium that strings our lives / together: paperchain people, / baskets lined under strip-lights" ('To David Foster Wallace'), to shivering over a beige Cornish pasty, "ticking over / before some godforsaken motorway service station" ('You Must Be Joking'), there is tenderness and touching honesty to be found in the darker moments he describes.
For this reason the collection's title is apt, for its scope reaches way beyond the boundaries of the football pitch and the fabled buzz of excitement, which rather serves as a backdrop against which the poet can stand and inspect the state of his own thumping heart.
- Andrew McCullouch, The Times Literary Supplement[18]Whenever I read Ben Wilkinson’s work I find myself admiring his craft.
It carries a precision of thought and expression that's hard to reproduce, in a syntax which is natural and a voice which is easy to hear, yet the poems abound with subtly used devices and effects.