They’re back, The Thursday Murder Club! The residents of Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are on the trail of the baddies once more and, as ever, are aided by Chris and Donna and of course, Bogdan, among others. The familiarity is comforting, like a cup of cocoa on a winter’s day. It’s a new puzzle but you know you’re surrounded by helpful friends.

To read Bill Manhire’s poetry is to be lulled, with an ironic lack of effort, into a landscape that is loaded with sense and meaning for the poet’s narrator(s), but perceived as gently out-of-kilter by the charmed observer.

In Passing How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious Lisel Mueller’s poem of natural evanescence is rendered with a delicacy that befits a barely perceptible transitioning of forms.

Liam Hughes’ wonderful new take on the medical profession as viewed from the assured, if not patrician, perspective of an informed backward glance corroborates at least one long-held suspicion: that its staff, because permanently beleaguered, are amongst the most sardonic of humourists.

Dance of the Stream Sprite Shuffle through the shady shallows, Leap from log to log, Tango past the tangled brambles, Tiptoe round the bog. Skipping, stepping, pirouetting where the minnows teem; I’m dancing to the mesmerizing music of the stream. Balance over broken branches, Limbo under bridges, Twist and turn through murky tunnels, Samba with the midges.

The Only English Kid When the debate got going on ‘Englishness’, I’d pity the only English kid – poor Johnny in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry.

Ground Gives Bauman’s Tetley lecture on his Liquid Modernity, how free-floating anxiety is our condition now, brought Heaney’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ to mind, its phrase ‘Ground gives’. Anybody who stepped on an icy pool, believing it strong enough to hold their weight, discovers liquid modernity’s meaning in a gut-churning rush as knowledge swamps faith.

Stories of the treatment of Allied prisoners-of-war by their Japanese captors in the Eastern theatres of the second world war would have fallen on deaf ears at my secondary school in the late sixties. Blindsided to the suffering of others by a tendency to self-obsession, there was little scope for empathy in the annals of preoccupied juvenilia.

The etymology of words plays much more than a passing role in Jayant Kashyap’s award-winning new collection for Poetry Business: his journey into the katabatic underworld of ritual and cultural observance is illuminated, at every turn, by recourse to the guideposts of language.

It’s a very long time since I read a book of poetry, a whole book, that is, in one sitting. What a confession for this retired English teacher! But when this book arrived through the letterbox, I was curious.