The best recent poetry: September 16 James Lasdun, an Englishman in New York, is all too aware of the flip side of the American dream. In "The Skaters," the opening salvo of Water Sessions (Cape, £10), he notices how the land of plenty has produced "beer guts slung over pants/ butts like boulders in spandex." "Blueberries" - "little fat droplets of transubstantiate sky" - reveals his unease in enjoying a comfortable life in a post-9/11 world. The title sequence both sends up and celebrates the talking cure. Half of Christopher Reid's Nonsense (Faber, £12.99) is devoted to "Professor Winterthorn's Journey," a satirical account of a widower's trip to a conference overseas. The so-called nonsense proves to be not just academic jargon but the lies we tell to console ourselves. Allusive and amusing by turns, it is nothing less than a novel in verse. In "Scorpio," one of the finer poems in Roger McGough's As Far As I Know (Viking, £12.99), he condemns the "literary critics/ who have made public fools of my children." Generally, though, he is in a genial mood, happy to use everything from haikus to acrostics to get a laugh. Only "Thud" is a dud. Jorie Graham favours very long lines broken by very short ones in P L A C E (Carcanet, £9.95). It's no coincidence that "Lapse" - the highlight of the collection - eschews this to reproduce the rhythm of the swing that her child is sitting on for the very first time. For once, her striving for cosmic significance does not seem a stretch. Bevel (Carcanet, £9.95) is an impressive debut from roofer-turned-rhymer William Letford. "Wit is it" comprises electrifying advice: "A sparky fay Partick sade it's impossible ti see/ bit yu'll know when yuv found it." Indeed.