LYCAN SIGH Matthew Barry

Kings, wolves and the spirit of war: the title comes from the opening poem, in which a seducer lays down the forester's axe and waits for the next conquest "in lycan sigh", the breath of a wolf between hunts. That note, half appetite and half regret, runs through the whole of Matthew Barry's collection.

Again and again he returns to men at the end of their power. An old king watches cinnabar caterpillars strip the ragwort while he tries to remember a girl. Edward I stands over the body of his little red carnation, Eleanor. Richard II, deposed and caged at Pontefract, offers his cousin the crown if only he will take the knife away. An oak carries the English story from the forests of Ariovistus to the age of steel, War speaks in its own voice from Xenophon's dancers to the trenches, and someone begs Franco to remember the dead while he watches the football.

Between the monarchs come a Wigan pit, a war widow's house where moths settle on the party dresses, a Czech waitress and a pink lemonade, and a cease-and-desist to William Carlos Williams. It is poetry in heavy cloth, all oak, iron and old crowns, and Olivia Petrini's cover matches it: a ruined abbey printed in oxblood on black.