Great Regulars: The workings of the poet's own sly wit

(the joke about the seventh line of a poem in the seventh line of a poem, the image of a shipwrecked man returned to his simian origins as he lies on an island "like a gorilla in a zoo") are deployed in shrewd counterpoint to the speakers' voices. These are poems that every smoker and office-goer will want to cut out and paste above their desks.

[by Tom Warner]

Goodbye, Tobacco

from The Caravan: Poetry: Two Poems

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These long poems by Annie Zaidi declare their subjects in their titles: greens and coffee. But in both poems these substances (and the poetic forms employed to describe them) work a long trail through particular human stories and structures. At first it seems as if the speaker of "Leafy Green Vegetables" is composing an innocent health-homily, the kind that might be used to educate children in the rigours of healthy eating and in the pleasures of language and rhyme.

from The Caravan: Poetry: Two Poems: Leafy Green Vegetables and Coffee Sestina

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