This essay discusses Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask in the light of some critical reviews of the verse novel, particularly that of Fiona Moorhead who had complained that it didn't really meet the criteria of the conventional genre of detective novels. Plunkett argues that at the heart of the novel, and the complaints against it, is the idea of a 'poetics of excision', a focus on what the text doesn't do, 'its silences and refusals'.