For example, Travelocity (0870 111 7060; ) has this week been offering Lufthansa flights via Frankfurt for £169 return, and Air Canada via Toronto for £172. You must book at least three weeks ahead for travel between Monday and Friday, but only half an hour in advance (subject to availability) at weekends.Bargain of the week: New Year in New YorkAirlines are scrambling for cash-flow to tide them over the lean winter months. On the world's busiest intercontinental air route, between London and New York, many of them have short-term promotions for flights at the start of next year. Instead of paying anything up to the full standard fare of £298 return to Paris or Brussels, a £59 fare will be available on any day of the week. The rule is that you simply show your Eurostar ticket to Brussels to SNCB (Belgian Railways) staff.

You are allowed to travel within 24 hours of arriving in, or departing from, Brussels, which opens up the possibility of a two-centre break - staying overnight in the Belgian capital, and travelling on to Bruges or Antwerp the next day.Travellers to adjacent countries may also make use of the deal: you can reach the frontier of Luxembourg, Germany or Holland.The other big change is for day-trip tickets to most Eurostar destinations. This includes the key Flemish cities of Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, and also opens up the less well-known French-speaking Walloon areas, such as Li? and the Ardennes. As a result, all of these destinations will be available at a fare of £59 from London Waterloo or Ashford, providing you book in advance and/or choose off-peak trains.Even better, you need not specify your destination in advance. As from tomorrow, a ticket to the Belgian capital will be valid for travel to anywhere else in the country, via Brussels-Midi station.

But more importantly there's the sense of a poet who is pushing for a style that is taut, elliptical and which is uncompromising in its desire to continue to forge a voice that is curious, and open to change, however disorienting, painful or delightful such transitions might be.Deryn Rees-Jones' new poetry collection 'Quiver: a mystery or what you will' is published by Seren in February. Destination of the week: anywhere in Belgium Destination of the week: anywhere in Belgium To coincide with the opening of the new line through Kent, Eurostar (08705 186 186; ) has transformed its fare structure to Brussels and beyond. The group of poems set in London Zoo are certainly more fragmentary and uncompromising, adding to the tenor of what is a sometimes cryptic and elusive book, exhibiting, too, a new playfulness that occasionally shows too palpably the influence of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon (it's testimony to his brilliance that perhaps no poet writing today can escape him). In "The Dissection Room" for example, the story of her doctor-parents' first meeting, she refuses to romanticise, or to allow the poem to topple into predictability as she literally bails out of the narrative - as she describes her mother placing her gloved hand inside the chest of a dead man who has his heart in the wrong place: "Who could tell if what she was groping for/ was a misericord or, failing that, a rip cord?"In some ways readers might find Minsk a less hospitable collection than her earlier work.

There are several poems that feature an Essex landscape, both the geographical and emotional terrain explored in her recent novel Mary George of Allnorthover. The excellent "Clownfish" is a wry look at the transformations of "[a]dolescents drowning in our own soup" and in "Essex Rag" she worries away at how we can leave a place which has already become a part of us: "there's nothing for it but to head home,/ unsure whether the last bus home has gone./ There's slow and there's discovery of slow./ The last bus has not gone./ It never comes." Greenlaw's eye is characteristically cool, detached, even, but aware too of the multiple ironies of looking. Minsk, however, shifts its focus to a concern with how we travel away from old familiar landscapes, negotiate new landscapes, and how in the process language brings us both nearer to and farther way from that which it attempts to describe. And so throughout the collection Greenlaw becomes enthralled by words, their sound, the way they look on the page, whether they are foreign or unfamiliar, picking up from the preoccupation with communication she explored so well in A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997). The title poem of the new collection Minsk begins with an anecdote: "Your great aunt lost till sprung/ by the London Underground inspector's question: / 'Where from?' As if bright lines / had led her brothers onto opposite sides / to meet once, thirty years on, / in an airport transit lounge in Miami". Like her great influence Elizabeth Bishop she has been concerned with how we negotiate subjective and emotional experiences and the more measured objective experiences that allow us to know ourselves in the world. Lavinia Greenlaw is perhaps the most prominent of recent poets to engage with the discourse and history of science in her writing, and since her first collection, Night Photograph (1993) she has been at the forefront of changing assumptions about the nature and scope of contemporary British women's poetry.