<p>The Milk Thief is time - as it colours the lives of the characters and relatives who feature in Paul Henry&rsquo;s new collection of poems. The first two sections of the book are set primarily against the backdrop of the Ceredigion coast in Wales. A giant turtle washed up on the beach, an encounter with the British Boomerang Champion...

<p>From the threshold of his own fiftieth year, Duncan Bush returns to the &rsquo;Fifties of his youth as a springboard from which to explore the second half of the twentieth century in ways often more autobiographical than anything we&rsquo;ve seen from his prizewinning previous collections.</p><p>A vivid series of...

<p>A voice of considerable power and intensity emerges from the work of Sarah Corbett. She is less interested in the everyday aspects of reality than in &quot;what moves beneath the surface of my own, and others&rsquo; experience&quot;. This infuses her poems with mystery and with the intent of discovery. They resound with...

<p>Rusted mining towns in the American west connect along dirt roads with the slate country of North Wales, peopled, not empty, in John Davies&rsquo; new collection.</p><p>At its heart is the sonnet sequence &rsquo;Reading the Country.&rsquo; Here tensions such as those between Welsh and English, nature and the slate...

<p><br /><br /><em>Hen benillion</em> (literally &rsquo;old verses&rsquo;) are a unique form of folk poetry in Britain. Dating from the sixteenth century and earlier these short verses, or chains of verses, were composed to be spoken or sung to a harp accompaniment. They have been performed at social...

<p>This is a remarkable first collection of poems by Barbara Bentley. Her distinctively witty voice brings us the up-to-date versions of the females of mythology.</p><p>&#39;Noah&rsquo;s Wife&rsquo; is plagued by her DIY-mad, boat-building spouse, &rsquo;Waking Beauty&rsquo; wakes from a cryogenic sleep into a...

<p><em>The Fluent Moment</em> is Ruth Bidgood&rsquo;s seventh collection and follows 1992&rsquo;s well-received <em>Selected Poems</em>.</p><p>Her intense response to the landscape of Powys combines with a constant curiosity about the inhabitants of the place, their histories and personalities. Yet...

<p>In the title poem, the protagonist basks by moonlight, becoming paler and paler until suffused with a strange bliss, an eerie spiritual purity, for &rsquo;night&rsquo;s the time when inspiration&rsquo;s filtered through the dark / and gleams.&rsquo; The poem sets the tone for Don Rodgers&rsquo; first collection, in...

<p>Significant events of the twentieth century, be they public and tragic or private and joyful, have inspired Desmond Graham to write this moving collection. The book features a number of elegies to the great poets of both world wars, including Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Keith Douglas. These poems are evocative of the...

<p>In <em>This House, My Ghetto</em> Mike Jenkins makes room for eccentric petrol pump attendants, beleaguered immigrants, odd lodgers, famous footballers and ghosts. This is not the Wales of postcards, but a very different post-modern, post-industrial landscape subject to the whims of petty bureaucrats lampooned in poems like...

<p>War and its effects have been an enduring subject throughout the twenty-five year writing career of Tony Curtis. The resulting poetry might have been bleak but for the sensitivity with which Curtis handles the theme, and the bravery and dignity in the face of barbarism which he finds underlying conflict. Poems such as &#39;Soup&#...