Perhaps it is his American self-confidence, or his illness, but Doty shows the reader how to perceive things in a new light as mortal and valuable phenomena. The poems are long and loosely formal – “Becoming a Meadow” is in terza rima – but not once does the clear progress of ideas falter. He is a true poet whose work is designed to make us think as well as listen.In Sean O’Brien’s Ghost Train (OUP, pounds 6.99), winner of the 1995 Forward Prize, railways become an appropriate object for an angry writer who begins a poem with the words, “When I walk by your house, I spit.” There are trains steaming over viaducts, storming the shires, rocking their guards, breaking the silence and sealing it again.O’Brien the trainspotter? Perhaps. But he is a born critic who thinks twice before setting verse to paper.

The trains roll through the background of the poems with provincial towns, brutalised youths or glimpsed girls in the foreground. The idea might be for a symbol to bind a past and present England the way Railtrack binds its geography: a diesel criticism of Thatcher’s society-no-longer-exists credo, in line with the poet’s politics. In spite of several petulant “hate” poems, Ghost Train has a more nostalgic hue than O’Brien’s previous books, marking a softening of his work.Better known as a publisher than as a poet, Neil Astley hasjust brought out his second book, Biting My Tongue (Bloodaxe, pounds 6.95). His poems are monologues dealing with large, topical issues – war, barbarity, social injustice. They tend to presuppose that the reader comes with a radical political viewpoint Once or twice, this is tiring. But Astley has the ability to be convincing as well as passionate, and offers some finely realised dramatic situations.

“The Magdalen Home Laundry”, a tale set in an Irish convent that imprisons “fallen” women, sums up a whole society, and is one of the four or five exceptionally good poems in the book.Jackie Wills is a journalist who once earned a living playing bass with a funk band. Her first collection, Powder Tower (Arc, pounds 5.95), has won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is another poet of observation, scrupulously picking out details to form poignant social dramas. Her poems do not offer a large canvas: rather, they are quiet snapshots of ordinary lives in Britain. Wills feels her way into each poem “the way a dancer learns a routine”.Jon Stallworthy is known as a critic, as well as the biographer of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice.

The Guest from the Future (Carcanet, pounds 7.95) holds eight poems, whose theme might be summarised in the lines “women with whom I never slept/ but who were with me when I woke/ and whispered ‘Courage’.” These are poems evoking women survivors and also poems by other poets – Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott underlying the form and plot of one long poem about a woman fleeing Communism in Poland. Stallworthy’s craft is like embroidery, delicately weaving rhyme and rhythm, art and life, present and past literature, 19th and 20th century concerns.To finish, light poet of the month must be Ann Drysdale. Her The Turn of the Cucumber (Peterloo, pounds 6.95) is a collection of reader-friendly verse in which she gently pokes fun at our literary pretensions and silly lives.. Collected Poems 1945-1990

Phoenix Giants, pounds 9.99
No Truce with the FuriesBloodaxe, pounds 7.95by RS ThomasRS Thomas cannot accurately be described as a hellfire Welsh minister from central casting: the precision and the heady audacity of his metaphors, the seamless, unostentatious surety of his metre and his crafty rhymes obviate that But his role as a priest is germinal. His creativity was first ignited by his work in a country parish in west Wales. He comes to this community of dour farmers stupefied by work and bleak weather, whom he represents through the persona of “Iago Prytherch”, armed with his passionate Christianity and his love of poetry, and he proceeds to get his literary teeth into the conflicts and tensions of the situation.The poet loathes Prytherch for his brutish simplicity (“Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales/ With your sheep and your pigs and ponies, your sweaty females,/ How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even/ Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church”) The Christian recognises Prytherch’s quality.