By "culture'' she means proven? custom and tradition, climate, colour, attachment to native soil, a mixture of radical and conservative politics. If someone gives you James H Rubin's Impressionist Cats and Dogs (Yale £25), you'll have a lovely Christmas present and will learn more about painting than about pets The title sounds arch. Next, what about a book on impressionist horses? If someone gives you James H Rubin's Impressionist Cats and Dogs (Yale £25), you'll have a lovely Christmas present and will learn more about painting than about pets The title sounds arch. Paterson expects his readers to make at least as much effort as he does Fair enough. When he takes his own advice and relaxes, though, he produces his very best work.

Landing Light contains a number of superb poems, including "St Brides: Sea-Mail", three persuasive versions of Cavafy poems, "The Landing", and "Waking with Russell", a memorable piece in which the poet returns the smile of his four-day-old son:See how the true gift never leaves the giver:returned and redelivered, it rolled onuntil the smile poured through us like a river.How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.In Don Paterson, Faber have a worthy addition to their remarkable list of poets.. Landing Light (Faber £12.99) contains elements familiar from earlier books: adroit versification; an uproarious, abrasive, occasionally rebarbative manner; dodgy sex - "that parched scrubland / between her thighs breaks open into wet''; jokey admonishments which are, depending on your taste, vigorous or hectoring - "Relax! Things are exactly as they seem''; "you're not taking this seriously enough''; and a Borgesian playfulness typified by "A Talking Book'' and the third instalment of "The Alexandrian Library". Like the owls of one poem "weighing up the world and us / on the tawny trays of their irises'', McKendrick is a marvellously attentive observer: he notices that an ink stain is "black with a tell-tale edge of blue-black and maroon'', and likens a grain of salt to "the kind of roof a child might put/on a painted house''.The underworld also features in Don Paterson's new volume. It comes as no surprise, then, that two of the exceptional collections of new verse this year appear from the same firm. Jamie McKendrick's fourth book, Ink Stone (Faber £8.99), sees the poet swanning around with trademark panache. Including a number of sonnets, a haiku, and a translation in terza rima, these 42 crafted poems are arranged in a quasi-narrative beginning in the air and ending in hell The most insistent motif of the book is eyes.

What will Moore's readers make of Schulman's I-know-best approach?A remarkable quartet, these four Collecteds reaffirm Faber's position as the pre-eminent publisher of English-language poetry. Larkin aficionados were disgruntled when Anthony Thwaite did much the same with his first edition of Larkin's poetry. As prolific as Hughes though wider in scope, Lowell also took his writing through a number of phases, from the muscle-bound early work to the free verse of Life Studies His formal schooling gives the later work its dynamism. As her editor reminds us, Moore's terse comment was "Omissions are not accidents". By including many unpublished and uncollected pieces, Grace Schulman's The Poems of Marianne Moore (Faber £30) refutes the late author's own Complete Poems, in which the poet omitted nearly half of her published poetry.