So October's poetry events have worked their magic and you're actually going to buy a new book of verse. The autumn poetry releases give you a rich and varied crop to choose from. Michael Longley's Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £25) is an obvious highlight. Whether as nature poet or war poet, Longley has a sensitive, resonant lyric voice; and his Collected Poems is a reminder of just how formidable [...]

One of Alan Brownjohn's better-known poems, "Knightsbridge Display-window", recalls how, in the garden of his thrifty great-aunt, "Potatoes flowered/Blue, white and green,/English republican colours". The poem goes on to celebrate the family's commitment not to grand rhetoric, the crown and its army, but to "cutting bread thinly" and to a "commonwealth of sense". As it is with Brownjohn's bread and potatoes, so it is with his poetry: this is verse [...]

Well-made, well-mannered and somewhat old-fashioned, the poems of Clive Wilmer have addressed themselves largely to matters of history and religion. If they've had an odour, it hasn't been of incense and sex so much as tweed jackets and C of E hassocks. In The Mystery of Things, Wilmer's old strengths are on show, but his preoccupations have gone south. As he puts it in "A Vision", a poem whose narrator [...]