Each is meant to be read within the time it would take for a match to be lit and burn out, as Armitage states in the first poem, "My party piece:"[4] I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves beyond its means, and dies, I say the story of my life — The second, Becoming of Age, contains 14 titled poems, including "Penelope", alluding to the wife who waits for the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, and "The Lost Letter of the Late Jud Fry", alluding to the dirty-fingernailed[4] farmhand character in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!.

It cited the fifth poem in the initial "Book of Matches" section as characterising Armitage's approach: describing the act of skimming stones on a lake, it admires his use of metaphor in[8] Pull!

Elspeth Barker in The Independent, admired the book, writing that "His virtuosity with form and metre has always been remarkable; here it is breakthtaking."

She noted that Armitage's persona had changed from his earlier collections, "quit[ting] his Northern Ladding and grown up."

[10] Ronald Carter, writing in 2001 in The Routledge History of Literature in English, called the book Armitage's "most distinctive volume".

[11] Daniel McGuiness, in The Antioch Review, thought Armitage the best of a new generation of young British poets, writing that "somehow this book has been written by the love child of Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop.