21st Century Verse

"Ours was just a period in the history of rain/One called by some The Inundation/And by others L'Apres-Moi."

It's a landscape of death and corruption, Britain is painted as a coffin ship, "Skeleton crews/Dancing hornpipes on islands of birdshit."

"Into the pit go all Estates/All princes, pimps and potentates/The fiend next door, the BBC/The living and those yet to be."

And yet, for all its concern with death and rain, The Drowned Book is less misanthropic than some of O'Brien's previous collections.

There is a splendid assault on Thatcher in Valedictory and a series of tender memorials to friends and writers including Julia Darling, Michael Donaghy, Keith Morris, Barry MacSweeney, Thom Gunn and Ken Smith.

"And on the bookshelves/English poets, all gone damp/With good intentions, never read." This is O'Brien's best book yet.

Safe Houses (Shoestring £8.95) is Chris Jones's first full-length collection. A third of the book is devoted to a stunning sequence about the River Don in Sheffield, where he lives.

Among the rubbish and litter, kingfishers "swerve/and flash like two struck matches," police sirens honk like a flight of geese, the soundtrack of "a city in spate."

Another sequence is based on Jones's experience of working as writer in residence at HMP Nottingham. Prison with its 100-year-old ghosts is where time "slows and thickens like gravy." It is the world of "the tampered phone card, botched canteen/the dancing cockroach, and the flea-stitched bed/the dirty needle, and unpaid debt/grit in the custard, letters lost in transit."

He writes powerfully about the alienation of being inside, the boredom of its sad and lonely routines. And he recognises the importance of language in jail. For so many of its inhabitants, "words are the enemy/Words that forget them, words that choose them/Words that fall over with no echo, no/bottom. It's the element they swim in."

Claire Fauset's This Poem is Sponsored By (Corporate Watch, £7) is published to mark the first 10 years of Corporate Watch, a radical research group based in Oxford.

It contains work by over 60 poets, including Atilla the Stockbroker, Mr Social Control, Nick Toczek and Adrian Mitchell, raging and railing against the power of multinational corporations.

As you would expect from what is essentially a book of performance poems - the book comes with a CD - it is an uneven work, sometimes marred by hollow sloganising and lazy writing, notably by Luke Wright, Rapunzel Wizard, Merrick and Ben Mellor.

But it is worth buying just for Claire Fauset's own Steal this Poem, Elvis McGonagall's parody of Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land and Will Holloway's rewriting of Martin Niemoller's I Did Not Speak Out.

"First they came for the Jews/But I did not speak out/Because I am an Artist/And I don't want to turn what I do/Into mere propaganda.

"Then they built gigantic missiles/Enough of them to destroy the Earth/But I did not speak out/Because Art is interested/Only in what is eternal."