The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark HaddonVintage, 2006 (originally Picador, 2005)

The first poem in this collection uses, as its title, a phrase from near the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (“Go, litel bok”); Chaucer is quoted again in the fourth poem (which includes the line “our litel spot of erthe that with the see embracéd is”). Much of the book is similarly allusive (translations/reworkings of some of Horace’s odes, a “decimation” of a John Buchan novel), and much of it is concerned with poetry itself: how it’s made, what it is, the way that poets spend their time “sweating to give birth/to replacement planets where things happen which don’t.” (Or, less optimistically: “They write a word/and then another word./It is usually wrong.”) “A Tally Stick” and “The Penguin” my favorite poems in the book, are both simple, unpretentious—the first about numbers, the leap to abstraction; the second about the zoo, seeing but not really seeing.