Hugh Haughton’s Second World War Poems (Faber £14.99) is a brilliant international reading of Total War. Akhmatova, Brecht, Paul Celan and Pasternak, soldiers and civilians, victims and survivors, take their places alongside Keith Douglas, Louis Simpson and many poets new to the general readership, such as the German émigré Franz Baermann Steiner, whose chilling 8th May 1945 concludes: “The wet flags drip into sultry, festive air. / Behind the roll of drums / A skater zigzags over a lake of blood.”

The poetry of the first world war is widely familiar, but Andrew Motion’s pocket anthology, First World War Poems (Faber £7.99), brings a fresh and expert eye to the subject, giving due place to Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney alongside famous but naive work by Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell, as well as poems by women both at home and in the medical corps. There is a handful of more recent pieces, by poets such as Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Michael Longley, as well as spectacularly obscene songs from the trenches, such as Tiddleywinks, Old Man, apparently to the tune of the Sailor’s Hornpipe: “When the rock of Gibraltar / Takes a flying leap at Malta, / You’ll never get your ballocks in a corn-beef can.” Exactly, given the circumstances.

New Poems on the Underground (Cassell £6.99), edited by Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, is the 10th edition of a scheme that still feels innovative. Up among the advertisements in the glum sweat of the stalled Tube carriage, the regularly renewed poems still catch and hold the traveller’s attention with a mixture of old and new. The older work — Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Coleridge — bears endless rereading, but some of the contemporary material here risks the opinionated sentimentality found among the amateur contributions to similar schemes found on buses and metro systems elsewhere. Time for a rethink, perhaps.

Dancing with Kitty Stobling, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Lilliput £9.99), collects the work of winners of the Patrick Kavanagh award 1971-2003. As the editor points out, Kavanagh might have looked askance at encouraging another 30 poets to join the standing army of 10,000 Irish bards, but there’s fine work here from Paul Durcan and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain as well as poets insufficiently well known in Britain, such as Conor O’Callaghan, Sinead Morrissey and Peter Sirr. Well worth a punt.

Last, Carol Ann Duffy’s entertaining bespoke anthology, Out of Fashion (Faber £9.99), pairs 50 contemporary poets and their choices of poems on costume and adornment. Highlights include Simon Armitage’s version of Sir Gawain, the classy show tune Buttons and Bows and Robert Herrick’s stylish smut. Not for the first time, however, this reviewer turns up wrongly dressed for the occasion.

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