Carol Ann Duffy: Rapture (Picador, London, 2005. 62pp, h/c, £12.99).

I have to confess that, although I've seen individual poems by Ms Duffy that I've liked, I'd never read a whole collection that actually did anything for me. I'm aware however that large numbers of people (and women, in particular), hold different views. Rapture, the poet's seventh collection, is a book of love poems and is a pleasant surprise. It's not free of the occasional lapse into sentimentality but this kind of poetry walks that delicate edge anyway. There are good poems here, some absolutely splendid and memorable lines, and, basically, a nice surprise.

Roy Fisher: The Long and the Short of It (Bloodaxe, Tarset, Northumberland, 2005. 398pp, pb, £12).

This is a book we've needed for some time, given that the old OUP Poems is long out of print. The poems have been re-ordered here, shaking up the old chronological survey, and it's none the worse for that. All the usual suspects are here, plus one or two unexpected ones, such as The Cut Pages, an experimental prose work hitherto excluded from Fisher's collected editions. There's been a bit of cramming of course, squeezing things into shorter spans than is perhaps good for them, but I can see why this would have been done. When you come down to the basics, Roy Fisher is one of the major British poetic voices from the second half of the 20th century, and this volume summarises his achievement. It's a great achievement, and it's splendid to have all the work together at last. A necessary book.

Alan Halsey: Marginalien (Five Seasons Press, Hereford, 2005. 416pp, pb (with CD-ROM), £15.50).

Marginalien is without doubt one of the most beautiful books of the year, and a tribute to Glenn Storhaug's design skills at Five Seasons. It's also an essential acquisition, being a kind-of interim uncollected not-really poems. Which is to say that most of the pieces here are in prose, or in hybrid forms involving prose, poetry, illustration, mock-translation. The most recent work, Memory Screen comes on the CD, where its fusion of word and image can best be delivered. Wonderful stuff: needs to be on your shelf and, better still, read.

Jeremy Hooker: Arnold's Wood (Flarestack Publishing, 2005. 44pp, chapbook, £3.00, isbn 1-900397-82-X).

A sequence of poems in memory of the late Les Arnold, poet and teacher — the title refers to a wood planted in his memory. Jeremy Hooker pays tribute to his old friend in a strong, tactile kind of verse that is notably short on sentiment. It works best seen as a whole, individual poems being parts of the greater whole rather than poems in their own right, and making a cumulative impact.

A good little collection, obtainable from the publisher at 41 Buckley's Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham B48 7NG.

Christopher Middleton: Tankard Cat (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 2005. 164pp, pb, $13.95).

The latest from Middleton, and a book which will appear in the UK towards the end of 2005 (from Carcanet) as The Anti-Basilisk, a title that I think I prefer. Some 40 pages or so is repeated from his previous US collection Of the Mortal Fire, a book which was not published in the UK. Those 40pp are Twenty Tropes for Dr Dark, which Enitharmon DID publish here five years ago. The rest however is new and shows that Middleton is still going strong. The opening two sections in particular (Tableaux 1-XX and The Anti-Basilisk) are very powerful, and the section devoted to some wonderful Catullus translations is a real delight. I am a devoted fan and Middleton always delivers. This volume is no exception.

Jennifer Moxley: Often Capital (Flood Editions, Chicago, 2005. 81pp, pb, $12.95).

It seems we're still catching up with Jennifer Moxley's work: the two sections here were previously chapbooks, published in the mid-90s, although the poems were written up to 5 years earlier than that. After the astonishing The Sense Record (Salt, 2003), we are thus now getting the back-story. The work presented here is in many ways a poetic dialogue with the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg (the capital is therefore of the Marx & Engels variety). It has the feel of an experiment and, I must say, an experiment that is not entirely successful. There are some powerful themes running through this book: revolution; the contrast between revolutionary politics and reactionary personal attitudes (above all towards women), and the problem for an active woman of finding space for herself. The problem of truth vs. necessity. BUT, I think most of this is shadowed here, which is to say, I don't think that the method adopted delivers the goods that the material suggests is there.

As usual with Flood, this is a fine production, and Moxley completists should not be without it.

Fiona Sampson: The Distance Between Us (Seren, Bridgend, 2005. 71pp, pb, £7.99).

Fiona Sampson's first collection, Folding the Real (Seren, 2001) seems to have had relatively little attention and I hope that this new volume — a novel in verse — gets rather more. I imagine that its theme—a love affair in trouble, the ache and pain of loss, and a sexually gratifying dénouement — will be looked at askance by some male critics, but I think they would do well to concentrate on the power of much of this book and the author's courageous attempt at something really quite unusual. There is a tension here between the (at times) lightweight, even clichéd expression of feelings that one might find in a romance novel and a very taut, heightened language. The book does not quite succeed, I think, but I admire the attempt and think Ms Sampson has a powerful poetic voice that is worth following. The book is clearly a confident step forward from her first collection and I look forward to seeing where she will go next.

Raoul Schrott: The Desert of Lop (trans. Karen Leeder, Picador, London, 2004. 104pp, pb, £12.99).

This is presented more or less as short fiction and, indeed the German original (Die Wüste Lop Nor, Hanser, Munich, 2000) was marketed as a novella in 101 chapters. It looks like a kind of free verse on the page, however, and even more so in the original, with its narrow page-format, and all the 'chapters' having ragged line-endings rather than double justification. It moves like fiction, however, and is probably best regarded as something of a poetic fiction, albeit one with more leanings towards poetry than is the norm. Karen Leeder's translation is excellent, and this love story in the desert, this travelogue, survives the switch of languages rather well. I have a suspicion that this won't stay in the catalogue for very long, and I've seen no reviews. A shame, as Schrott's work deserves better.

Gary Snyder: Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker Hoard Publishers, Washington D.C., 2004. 112pp, h/c, $22/C$30.95).

The first collection of new work by Snyder in quite a while, this is probably his best collection of shorter poems since Regarding Wave, way back in the early 1970s. His last book, the very fine Mountains and Rivers Without End (which have finally ended), suggested that the old pro was right on form and this one bears it out. Some of the poems are weak, prosaic throw-aways, but the great majority show that wonderful tough earthiness, that grasp of soil and rock that the best of his early poems showed. It's a real pleasure to find one of your old heroes coming back with a gem like this one. Snyder's still one of the best around; for a good while, it looked as though he might have lost his way, but, no, here he is, doing what he does best.

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copyright © Tony Frazer, 2005. All quotations are copyright © by the authors.