Not Lacan's Mirror, but Ovid's Pool.

What happens in Michael Haslam's poems is always unusual, unexpected, whole, which is why it is not possible to append a quotation to this description of his book, but only to quote one of his enabling aphorisms. The pool has been a recurrent image, metaphor, emblem in his work. This book was intended to be a Collected Poems -- Haslam's published work has hitherto been scattered amongst small independent presses. But collecting involved revising, recomposing, balancing, to contain and to extend. A Whole Bauble is written 'as an outcome of letting an imagined Psyche upset and engage the Author, upstaging and enacting by pages, and together making baubles in coincidence with rhyme and number form. Here the spirit is caught between spikes and comfort in the crises of a life. How much pain can the lightest bauble contain? May not that pain pop as a sort of grace?'
    
The Psyche is not monstrous, the fairies are beautiful, though as the Psyche is imagined as fully as possible the poet loses control of the better part of it. He may be abused by unknown purposes or put to therapeutic use. He comes up as a clown, with the world of nature, gala balloons, a string of sausages from the jacket pocket, the fruits of Cornucopia, sexual intercourse, childbirth, floods of tears, etc., as one approximation to A Whole Bauble.