Meanwhile, Andrew Motion is a generous, sensitive appreciator of other people's poetry, passionate about reading and representing it as well as writing it. I'm sure that he will have read and enjoyed all these books. Jo Shapcott kick-starts her beautifully cadenced third collection with a Lewis Carroll-y quote from William Carlos Williams: "What are all those fuzzy-looking things out there?" Those fuzzy-looking things are the world. Tabloids, rattlesnakes, Noah's ark, motoring manuals, swallowshit: My Life Asleep presents a world of lunatic flotsam and jetsam We have a two-way relation with it. We look at it, turn into it; and it - like Shapcott's uppity quark, who tells a scientist where to get off - talks back to us.From a shape-changing sea goddess to dead Dennis Potter, "as live to me as the tongue in my mouth", bodies, animals, identity, sexuality and metamorphosis take centre-stage. Potter's resurrection is staged as "the most painful erection in heaven/ rising through its carapace of sores/ and cracking skin to sing in English." The 35 consummately worked, playful poems, with a lovely innovative music, turn sex, death, zoology, love and micro-physics into a range of profound, irreverent questions.Blackstaff Press has collected all the Irish poems of Carol Rumens, an English poet who spends most of her year in Northern Ireland.

Holding Pattern opens with brave, skilful love poems:"Dear God I loved her./ But no, I'm a woman, English, not young How could I?.../ Oh let me die now. And the dark was all flame as I drank/ The heart-breaking odour of Muguets des Bois and red wine -/ Hers, though I have to admit, it could have been mine."But the whole thing is a love poem to Belfast itself: its female side, rather than the macho face familiar from the media. Rumens homes in on social divisions within its divided people: "I'm on three types of pills," she says, "It's dreadful,/ So it is Abyssinia Street. A hellhole./ Do you really like Belfast? Are you going to be staying?/ I'm frightened to go out." "Couldn't you move,"/ One of the women says kindly, "To the suburbs?"/ Something collapses in the long silence./ Call it religion. Say what emerges, naked/ And guileless as the orange walls, is Class.The double edge of "going to be staying"; the way the dragged rhythm of the "something collapses" line incarnates the social gulf opened up by that "suburbs" question (no inconvenient violence there) - all this, in understated technique, supports the tricky enterprise of a poet living and writing among people who do not have her freedom to choose where to live. Knowing she is the foreigner whose concern is always suspect, Rumens poignantly addresses questions of community and love.Jackie Kay's third collection is an angrier, more humorous landscape. Like the tapeworm in Irving Welsh's Filth, disease is her metaphor for social cruelty, especially racism.

An illegal immigrant is arrested, a black servant flogged; the Starr report expands the marital demands of "Paw Broon", her archetypal paterfamilias: "Christ, wait a minite./ I'm no a lollipop.../ Gie me a guid sook. C'mon, c'mon./ Haud on! Let me/ position masel./ Wisna the President/ staundin' agin a wa'/ or wis it the lavvy door?/ ...Whit the Hell's wrang noo?"Kay, a black Scot adopted by white Communists and a prize-winning novelist, has always linked her poems strongly. The linking principle in Off Colour is identity, bizarrely intertwined (as in detective stories' identification of a corpse) with dentistry. The black immigrant, who died when her mouth was taped, had gorgeous teeth ("Milk stones.

Pure ivory.") A stranger tells the Poet she must be Ibo: "Those teeth are Ibo teeth, the stranger said./ I had no doubt, from the way he said it.../ that Ibo teeth are perfect pearls.English, in love with Belfast; black, exploring identity in (literally) the teeth of a racism-rotten society; a surrealist whose vision of identity alchemises everything, herself included, into mad cows or Mrs Noah: these three poets place themselves in positions that force them to challenge the world. Their poems are witty, risky, lyrical, teasing; rich, strong, socially questioning Cleverness is at the service of feeling. In different modes, they all stand for putting vulnerability, both emotional and physical, squarely on the line.What else do they have in common? Oh, yes They are all women.Ruth Padel. WHAT DOES the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes have in common with the appointment of Andrew Motion as poet laureate? Or with the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords? Or with the formal notice of complaint to be issued against Summerhill School? Or with countless other developments we have witnessed under the Blair Government? They are all examples of "pragmatic" New Labour's tendency to make ideologically driven leaps before they look.

In the case of Milosevic, it might have been expedient to have issued a warrant for his arrest before piling in and slaughtering members of the Serbian public. In the case of Motion, it might have been wiser not to spray people's-poet rhetoric around like pre-pubescent train-taggers before enstating the obvious. In the case of the Lords it would, of course, have been more sensible to have had just half an idea about how the old sods might be replaced before handing them their jotters. And in the case of Summerhill? Well, the Government's education policy has from the beginning been notably illogical and lacking in sensible priority. But this latest skirmish in the battle to "raze standards", as we are led to believe that Summerhill's pupils might put it, beggars belief.It's not that I have any interest in defending the rights of wealthy leftie parents to shell out pounds 6,500 a year so that their children can skip maths and learn to French kiss. It's not that I believe that AS Neill's progressive ideal of children being allowed to "develop free from fear" is unique to Summerhill and that it should be protected. It's not even that I want to engage myself with the idea that some Summerhill pupils are there because they have not responded to traditional methods anyway, and that it is this factor that contributes to the school's poor standards.It's just that I object to taxpayers' money being spent on interfering with the opted-out education choices of the international rich (at Summerhill between a half and two-thirds of the pupils are from abroad). Because I'm certain that the Government's education wallahs must have better things to do with their time and money than engage in all kinds of ideological argy-bargy just to shut down a private school with some funny ideas and a maximum of about 30 British pupils in attendance.Like, oh, I don't know, continuing to defend the previous government's insistence on parental choice, so that really privileged progressives such as prime ministers can get an education for their children that's much better than Summerhill's, only absolutely free.Or, wait! Even better! How about deploying all of the human and financial resources at the disposal of the Government to make all schools within the state education system second to none, thus ensuring that the only reason for opting for private education, or indeed exercising any parental choice at all, is sheer social snobbery?Then how about making it clear that opting out of state education means subsidising it, by paying through the nose for Ofsted inspections, for participation in state examinations, for inclusion in the league tables, for attendance at further education establishments and for every other service that the existence of a integrated, nationwide, state-education structure provides?Whoops! I forget myself.