In ‘The Good-Morrow’, John Donne writes that love ‘makes one little room an everywhere’. Although Peter McDonald doesn’t aspire to encompass ‘everywhere’ in One Little Room, you’d be hard pressed to find another volume of contemporary poetry with such a wide range of references and variety in form and style. Historical and cultural figures abound in strange combinations – the French poet St-John Perse rubs shoulders with Hitler – but the poems are saved from mere anecdotage through their focus on moments of coincidence and intense emotion. ‘Omaha’ finds W B Yeats walking along beaches in Sligo and Normandy and imagining ‘supernatural flesh/emerging from the water’. Later, during the D-day landings on the same stretch of Normandy coast, ‘boys ran from those waves, leaving their lives behind/on Omaha, boys virgin for ever’. In ‘Roxbury Gothic, 1832’, a young, recently widowed Ralph Waldo Emerson breaks open his late wife’s coffin to ‘cauterise his grief’. Yet he finds only, in McDonald’s distressing euphemism, a ‘sad girl’s face/not her face any more’.

Alongside long historical poems are shorter, highly personal lyrics. Many of these more intimate pieces are written in muted, half-rhyming quatrains, a form in which McDonald excels and that displays his talent for understatement and restraint. These are exemplified in ‘The Victims’, a poem voiced by those killed in the Troubles. ‘We went early,’ it begins, with a beautiful lack of emphasis. It finishes with the victims dissolving into the surroundings: ‘we have gone to thousands of places now’. 

Will Eaves’s style in Invasion of the Polyhedrons differs markedly from McDonald’s. Eaves is more unbuttoned (and often unzipped: ‘We were both a little embarrassed to have met at a sex club’ is the charming first line of ‘Harvest’). His poems are anecdotal, first-person, occasionally elusive and game-playing. Eaves