The best new poetry collections from John Kinsella and Ruth Padel John Kinsella's native Australia is in evidence on virtually every page of Armour (Picador, £9.99). It is a strange world of bogongs (moths) and boobooks (owls) that often collides with our own - literally in the case of "Write-off," which describes a terrifying night-time clash between car and kangaroo. A portrait emerges of a boy determined to escape his Outback origins through the power of words, who nevertheless grows up to acknowledge that language "explains who you are." Pondering the connection between armour and amour, Kinsella shows our protective shell can be pierced by love. Monsters - real and imaginary - roam throughout Olivia Byard's Strange Horses (Flambard Press, £8). She notes "the dog heads/the sciapods, and those weird souls/with heads down in their chests" in Hereford Cathedral ("Mappa Mundi") and the flickering, averted eyes of a boy-policeman at Greenham Common in "Monstrous Regiments." Graham Mort specialises in revealing all that is "underfoot and unsaid" ("Dowser") in Cusp (Seren, £8.99). It is a far-ranging collection - mentally and physically. "Electricity" is an epic hymn to the life-force but the highlight is "Manchester": "love, its dirt of ingrained truth/that all human beauty is impure." Poetry and prose form a double helix in Ruth Padel's The Mara Crossing (Chatto & Windus, £12.99). Macro and micro combine in an engrossing meditation on the theme of migration. All kinds of organisms - from amoebas and zebras to men and women - follow the same dance of lovemaking and leave-taking. The result reads like a collaboration between Dorothy Wordsworth and Darwin.