Fiona Sampson's impressive Rough Music is different again, working with fresh-peeled vividness to get at the quick of experience as it happens. In The Betrayal "broken and new/ as a staggered chord,/ the next moment/ comes racing back/ along your glance", while The Rain-glass is more celebratory: "Your foot sinks through a world/ that's clear as a dream; bell clear, //water sounds on all sides./ Drains and pipes ring, rinsed/ to a concrete vowel/ of culvert, a gutter's tinny flow."

Just as these instances aim at more than description, so the whoe ambitious book avoids the anecdote in favour of the event. Sampson is in a sense a European poet (she is a prolific translator) who discloses a kind of utopian practicality in rendering the details of a world that dor all its grimness remains open to refreshment. She might well crop up among this year's prize nominees.