Clare Shaw's fourth collection shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are - and especially how we feel - as psychology. The book is inhabited by the character of Monkey, who shows by example how early attachments and trauma may shape us, but how ultimately we come to realise our own general theory and practice of love.
The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Penelope Shuttle's new poems. The second part of the book, New Lamps for Old, is a collection of poems searching for meaning in life after bereavement.