From personal to political: Twenty-first century poetry

Flitcroft is especially good at writing about things in poems such as Sonnet To A Bacon Sandwich and the comforting limits of the natural world in On The Edge, Nightlife, Flying Club and Bamburgh.

Best of all is Just Another Moment Of Epiphany On My Way To Work: "It was the trees. Just the trees, that's all./Nothing to do with ritual or God... Across the fields poplars pointed a flotilla of masts./Alders waved their regatta of flags... Earth was still warm. Atmosphere cooling."

Steven Blyth also writes wonderfully about domesticity and the triumphs and failures of a life defined by family, friends, work and love. In his new book Both (Smokestack Books, £7.95), he watches himself as a son, lover, husband, dad and office middle-manager.

It's a collection which focuses on masculinity and class, family Christmases and corporate strategy meetings, and Blyth explores the small disappointments and large hopes just below the surface of the working day.

Bill Greenwell is well known for his nine-year stint as the New Statesman's resident satirical poet and as the author of comic classics like Labour Pangs, Spoof and Tony Blair Reminds Me Of A Budgie.

His new collection Ringers (Cinnamon Press, £7.99) contains plenty of good jokes and some neat parodies of Auden, Belloc, Herrick and Blake. Distinctive Mongolian Eyes is a chilling take on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.

But there is a lot more to this book than intellectual and political wit.

Greenwell is especially good at revealing the emotional depths beneath the surface of everyday language, playing with ordinary phrases until they unfold into extraordinary poems, as in Slander, Supermarket, Girders, Checkout and Ringers.

This is the collection that should establish Greenwell as one of our most original poets, one who can handle almost any subject with an enviably light and skilful touch.

Pauline Plummer's new book From Here To Timbuktu (Smokestack Books, £7.95) is about a journey across the Sahara.

The fabled city of Timbuktu, once the dazzling commercial and intellectual capital of the Songhay empire, is now just another impoverished desert town on the adventure holiday trail for affluent Western tourists.

The book, which tackles issues of Third World poverty and First World consumption, follows the fortunes of a group of cash-rich/time-poor tourists as they make their way by 4x4 and pinasse across the Mali desert.

Like Chaucer's pilgrims on the road to Canterbury - the book is written in rime royal - they pass the time bickering, gossiping, flirting and falling out.

Eddie Linden is best-known as the founder-editor of the long-running literary magazine Aquarius.

His new collection A Thorn In The Flesh: Selected Poems (Hearing Eye, £7.50) celebrates pacifism, sexual politics, sex and his native Glasgow. It is a slim volume, but worth buying for poems like City Of Razors, The Miner, Editor and The Slum, "The mean street with ragged children/Dog-shit and broken glass./The fuzz crawling around/As if protecting the slums."

John Gibbens's Orpheus Ascending (Smokestack Books, £7.95) is a new adaptation of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Like Salman Rushdie, Nick Cave, Rilke and Cocteau, John Gibbens recasts the Orpheus myth in contemporary terms, this time in a strangely altered version of the 1980s London music scene, a retro-future where violent unrest meets government backlash and music, love, fascism and London intertwine: "The Thames like a contraband tape/of perpetual nothingness,/glittering, streams and flickers on... Apart from headlights, streetlights, moon,/neon, pub lights, stars and your eyes,/everything's out. We're in the dark/of fairy-tales and betrayals."