SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE PRIZE FOR POETRY In a ruined garden children play cowboys and Indians while their fathers fight the Cold War. The children grow up and discover the enemy are also people. The Empire shrinks to an opera audience. The Royal Family is reduced to waxworks. A mediaeval university town finally gets its ecological mass transportation system.

"Leans" is the condition experienced by a jet pilot as he leaves the Earth's gravity. The book brings together four chapter-books and the remaining poetry that completes the poet's twenty-three-year project Gravity as a consequence of shape started in 1982. The earlier two volumes were Gravity and Entanglement, published in 2004 and 2005. The work includes brief and clear descriptions of scientific vocabulary along with poetry that demonstrates enjambment and transformations of poetry derived from collage practice or a practice that uses more than occasion to inform the work all at once in...

"Pitch" is a skeptical monument, tracking an encounter with an edge we might pitch over, with the pitch dark of our time, with our lurching desires to do the necessary work of seeing and understanding. This book manifests one of the more distinctive ethical-aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry.

Echo Train begins "Once upon a time / Books began this / Way" and asks us not "to be shocked to find / We must return and / Stand for what we are" when we reach the book's end. Readers who said they tend to avoid poetry altogether sat down with the intention of reading one or two poems and found themselves reading it all the way through in a single sitting.

Throughout this collection, opposites collide - reality and delusion, political activism and apathy, friend and enemy, life and death. These poems cut away at convention and simmer with unsettling, dramatic images. Ironic and humorous, complex and engaging, you can't do without The Opposite of Cabbage.

Contains poems that are direct and emotional. This title includes poems that do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.

"Restricted View" is the colourful and highly anticipated debut collection from the award winning young poet and journalist Olivia Cole. From London to New York and Italy, she takes readers on a journey as public as it is private. Like Mr Chatterbox, the gossip columnist who makes things up, it's impossible to know where the poet's true feelings lie: in her poems about herself, or in the cast of intriguing characters that she brings to life. The view, encompassing art and history as well as the chaos and cluttered beauty of city life, is as vivid and tantalizing as it is restricted.

Shout Ha to the Sky explores history and contemporary life from a Maori person's perspective, and seeks to restore possibilities removed through the forces of colonialism. The poetry is intimate, wry, funny, angry and always loving. It weaves into and dialogues with multi-genre work by a range of Pacific authors such as Anne Salmond, Albert Wendt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Witi Ihimaera, and the late Hone Tuwhare, as well as writing from outside the Pacific by Anna Seward, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, Keats, Vijay Seshadri, Dante Alighieri.

An ambitious sequence of prize-winning poems, Flatlands unearths a living world from Britain's prehistory. The poems' stark forms evoke the voices of flint miners, tribal warriors and Boudica rebelling against Roman rule. Exploring universal themes - love and infidelity, bereavement and sometimes murderous hatreds - Flatlands holds a mirror to ourselves.

In the search to clarify the past-and thus transform the present, these poems turn over the shards of memory like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope, looking for an angle that will light up the great mystery of how we become and continue becoming who we are. Terry Ann Thaxton has published poetry in Cimarron Review, Hayden's Ferry, West Branch, Hawai'i Review, Connecticut Review, and other journals. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she teaches creative writing and directs The Literary Arts Partnership at UCF.