The fall from childhood

It would be interesting to know how many physicists or trade union leaders, for example - or primary school teachers - most British poets could name. Considering the dullness of a lot of contemporary poetry, it is hardly surprising to find that so much of it is already forgotten.

But here are five beautiful new books of poetry that are utterly memorable.

Ellen Phethean's Breath (Flambard, £7) is partly a book about memory and imagination, looking forwards and looking back - a London childhood in the 1950s, growing up in the 1960s, motherhood in the 1980s (see the wonderful Let Down and Eating Her Children), family life in the 1990s.

But the core of the book is an extraordinarily brave and painful sequence recording the "journey through grief" which Phethean travelled after her partner, the composer Keith Morris, was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2005.

Poems like The Driver, The Focken Men, Journey, The Republic of the Dead, Sorry for Your Troubles, Eating Her Lover, Sorrow and Rowing Home are great poems by any standard, unbearable descriptions of loss as a place of "space and time and silence," where "death/puts paid to every plan, and all we order/are the rooms we wander, rearranging/photographs."

A whole life is gone in an instant - "the sperm meets the egg, the blink of an eye, the last breath."

"Day is just a moment held in night," writes Cynthia Fuller in Background Music (Flambard, £7).

It is a book about the overgrown, tangled paths of memory down which we try to retrace our steps, the low "background music" against which we play out our lives - old addresses, forgotten faces, fading photographs and family histories.

There is a lovely, autumnal feel to these poems, especially Beside The Seaside, Ex-lovers, Into Winter, Idols, Garden Birds and Playing Grandmother.

At the beginning of 2006 Linda France set herself the challenge of writing a renga verse every day for 12 months. Book Of Days (Smokestack Books, £7.95) is the world's first "year renga," part spiritual diary, part travelogue, a record of friends, walks, the weather, things seen, heard and read, the natural and man-made.

Illustrated by Sue Dunne's ceramic fragments, these 365 tiny word pictures bear witness to the flow of things, change and decay, inside and out, the numinous and the everyday - "poems are like dreams:/in them you put what/you don't know you know."

Kathleen Kenny was brought up in an Irish-Geordie family where her father and her brother never spoke to each other.

Hole (Smokestack Books, £7.95) is the story of a lifelong struggle to understand the unspoken secrets contained in the silences of her childhood, to measure the damage and the hurt of its "strange normality."

Set against the changing landscape of the west end of Newcastle in the 1960s, it connects "the accidental fall from childhood" to the violent demolition of a working-class community, "Great Wars and small tragedies," "muffled grumbles" and "muted tongues" "making chasms between what should be whole."

Jennifer Copley's Beans In Snow (Smokestack Books, £7.95) is also about the death of a loved brother. It uses famous folk-tales to explore the world of childhood, its consolations and cruelties, real and imagined.

Childhood is a dark wood full of hungry giants, big bad wolves and child-sized ovens, where "brothers and sisters get separated -/boys turned into swans,/girls put into tall towers/where they have to climb down their own hair/to escape, then wander the earth/with thorns in their eyes."

It is a book about fear and belief, and about our enduring need to believe that everyone lives happily ever after.