Me and the Dead

In one of the best debut collections for ages, Katy Evans-Bush rises to the challenge of finding words for our times, meeting them in the nurseries of children or the battlefields of Iraq. Her work is various, educated and promiscuously open to experience: a Bishoppy moose makes an unepiscopal escape into TV's 'Northern Exposure' as its name morphs through Muldoonian games; Catullus is translated into rougharse while the title-poem takes the pulse of modern death. She makes good use of her joint passport into British and American poetry, which now often seem to share a whole language of faux amis, in a book which is stylish and funny, cultured and humane. This is contemporary poetry for grown-ups.