Intimate Chronicles is Christopher Middleton's first collection of poems since The Balcony Tree (1992), which roused the British critic T.J.C. Harris to write, "Middleton is one of the most extraordinary and extraordinarily neglected English poets." Intimate Chronicles, a 'late work' by traditional measure, offers some of the poet's freshest and strangest work; indeed, the poems constantly outwit and outplay traditional measures. Writing in a way "always open to the unexpected...his poetry has a genuinely improvised quality that does not give the impression of being a method. His experiments are invariably interesting to read-that is to say, they are more than experiments.