New Releases by Helen Dunmore

One morning a woman wakes up and finds her body has disappeared. She tries revenge on her lovers, solitary celibacy, marriage and magic as she struggles to get it back. Another woman watches a clump of cells that will be her next baby swim towards her like a space-ship on an ultrasound scan. A third strips naked to bathe in the cold waters of Balnacarry. These powerful poems express the loneliness, comedy and pleasures of life in the body. They explore sexuality and the huge changes of pregnancy and age=ing. They ask what it is really like to think, feel and write ''with two hearts beating inside me''. Women have often been told they must choose between children and artistic creativity. Helen Dunmore challenges the falsity of that choice, as her fifth collection of poems appears at the same time as her new baby.

Despite her romantic dreams of travelling in exotic countries, Colette finds herself on holiday in a small coastal town with little to get excited about. But she soon finds that it''s not where you go, it''s the people you meet that really matters.

Most of the country is unnatural. Even apparently wild places such as moors and commons were created by a complex chain of decisions: to fell trees, to graze animals, to drain land. Helen Dunmore''s The Raw Garden relates these changes wrought in the landscape through centuries of human intervention to the fascinating and sometimes terrifying state of change made possible by recent advances in genetic engineering. This book of closely linked poems celebrates a familiar world of landscape and human relationships, but at the same time it leads us to explore and question our own "sense of the natural".

The Apple Fall is a remarkably assured first book of poems. It is a celebration of the lives of all kinds of women, from figures such as Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald to the anonymous peace campaigners of Greenham Common. Helen Dunmore''s poems are concerned with that web of family which constricts or supports us: about becoming a mother and living closely with children; about the many facets of solitude. Helen Dunmore has a strong command of rhythm, and writes with fluency and sensitivity to achieve both precision and sensuousness. Her poems are fresh and direct, combining authority with lightness of touch - rare qualities in contemporary poetry. The Apple Fall is a book of poems with the widest appeal.