The brilliant Paulin has set himself the hardest of tasks: he needs somehow to match Milton’s Satan, to bring on Hector and Andromache. This “epic in cento form” (a cento is a gathering of quotations) is either about to take off, or to ramble and rumble. Yet the chat of the 1925 Locarno conference seems more of a set-piece than the air war Paulin’s portrayal of Churchill so far is disappointing. This might be how a historian would approach the matter, but it could prove a mistake for the modern epic poet.The Invasion Handbook stops around the Battle of Britain Invasion has been averted.

Conventional epics start by plunging into the midst of things Paulin’s has a 20-year run-up to the start of hostilities. Too much of this and the poem will become exhaustingly mannered. “(I need this bogus balance like an architrave/ they’re blocks of hollow stone my adjectives)”, explains Albert Speer in an awkward parenthesis. Will there be more of the experience of women, children, and poor bloody infantry, or will the poem be characterised by bitter hobnobbing with Chaps of History?The greatest difficulty, though, lies with the style, already prone to buzz with bees from Paulin’s bonnet: longish bits of Joycery and word-quibbles.

Among the challenges succeeding volumes will face are how to portray more heroism (an epic demand), rather than just offer a ironic jabs. But Paulin has locked himself into a grand design whose problems are evident. Given that The Invasion Handbook already runs to 200 pages, the epic may sag under its own archival cleverness, and be best read only in excerpts.The book is evidence of huge ambition, substantial achievement, stylistic cunning, and distinctive music Enough for most poets. The style’s juddery erudition is a recognisably individual achievement, but, like Raine’s, may be unsuited to extended work. I wish Paulin would do more of that.It’s unfair to judge his project at this stage, but already it may be too long. Keith Douglas, T S Eliot, Alun Lewis and Sorley MacLean are less analytical than Paulin when they write during and about the effects of war; they tend to avoid great men but write very movingly about ordinary soldiers, civilians, routines. Paulin is cleverly pissed off.It’s tempting to compare The Invasion Handbook with some of the great Second World War poems written by poets from these islands.

Yet where the greatest modernist poem, The Waste Land, communicates through its breakage a powerful longing, Paulin’s bitty epic conveys more a soured intelligence Eliot is visionary. This technique is in part a modernist ploy, and can be a brave one Poetry should not be about dumbing-down. It loves nothing better than to sidle up to the movers and shakers – from the Bauhaus to Locarno, Lenin to Alec Douglas-Home – and skewer them with knowing nods and winks, sometimes in a way that leaves its readers feeling ignorant.The occasional footnote both helps and annoys. Yet there’s also more than a dash of celebrity culture to Paulin’s “looseleaf epic”. Immediately arresting, too, is Paulin’s stinging wee poem on the killing of George V:In time for the morning papersLord Dawson of Pennthe king’s doctorannounces ‘we have done all we …canto stem the course of his diseasebut now the King’s lifeis drawing peacefully to its close’then knowing it doesn’t matter ifsome flunkey noticeshe injects a mixtureof morphine and cocaineinto his jugular veinThe violently, sleazy machinations of low dishonest decades are grist to Paulin’s mill They fit into our age of spin. In its total of nine lines, “The F?r on Language” captures the banal battiness of a totalitarian mind.