RESULTS

The poems in 'Billy's Rain' chart the course of a failed love affair: its secret joys and emotional pitfalls are explored with subtlety and irony. A poem from this collection will be used as the theme for the London Photographic Award.

Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the many tenses and afterlives of desire are parsed - in sawn-off monologues, short stories in verse, thumbnail dramas and splintery photographs.

In this collection, poets provide portraits of their fellow performers on the human stage, in homage and in satire. Personalities featured include Elvis Presley, Oscar Wilde and the Duke of Buckingham, as well as the less famous, including Butch Weldy and Waring.