The Word for Sorrow by Josephine Balmer
Salt £12.99; 56pp Buy the book

The Cinder Path by Andrew Motion
Faber & Faber £12.99; 58pp Buy the book

The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob A. Mackenzie
Salt, £12.99; 54pp Buy the book

This month Anzac Day will be commemorated in Australia and New Zealand. Even here a ceremony will take place at the Cenotaph in London. On April25, 1915, soldiers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps attempted to disembark to help in the attack on the Turkish forces - then allied with Germany - who held the crucial waterway across the Dardanelles. Many hundreds of Anzacs died on that day and in the days that followed. Those that survived did not do much better: a long battle of attrition followed, dysentery and malaria were rife and clouds of black flies descended. This is one of the scenes behind Josephine Balmer's brilliant and original collection The Word for Sorrow.

She weaves together three stories - from the 1st century AD, and the beginnings of the 20th and 21st centuries. Tristia, by the Roman poet Ovid, written in exile at Tomis on the Black Sea, is her starting point. Her second tale is sheer serendipity - a name in an old Latin dictionary bought at a summer fête when she was a teenager, and resorted to during a power cut caused by an electrical storm. The previous owner of that book turned out to have fought at Gallipoli. And the third is her own story, as a woman whose family suffered in the “war to end all wars”, and as a poet, aware of poetry's processes.

It is a persuasive juxtaposition. The three “voices” pass images one to another, like the black and white butterflies that Balmer sees in the Dardanelles cemetery or the dark hair of both exile and soldier silvered with pain. They also share feelings as each looks back to the lost place - Rome for Ovid, and Gloucestershire lanes for “Geoffrey”. Then they exchange and tease out jokes and puns, as in one of the opening poems entitled Hail, which is Ovid's Roman greeting and Balmer's initiating thunderstorm.

By turns moving, funny and horrific, Balmer's collection is almost unbearably sad - “We none of us need a dictionary/To define the word for sorrow”. But it is also brave - “Poetry must, poetry can only tell the truth. / In life we have to lie to stay alive”.

Apparently the Queen and Tony Blair told Andrew Motion that he “didn't have to do anything” when he was appointed Poet Laureate. So he was not being asked to lie to live, but he has, nonetheless, been very industrious while in post.

His new collection, The Cinder Path, has an elegiac quality. This is partly because several of its most effective poems are about his father's death, including Passing On, in which the poet looks forward to his own demise. The Wish List details the emblems and symbols that he would bury with his father. The Mower conjures a vision of an ordinary childhood day “cutting clean through me then vanishing for good”. But the best of these poems is Veteran, as Motion tries to understand the war experience that shaped his father's life “now dust has settled again / and fear, grief, boredom, pain / have found out how to fade into the later life he made”.

Like Balmer, Motion looks back to the First World War, with five delicate poems on Harry Patch - “that's a good name,/ Shakespearean, it might be one of Hal's men/at Agincourt or not far off” - the last British survivor of the trenches. Like Balmer, too, many of these pieces are what Motion describes as “found poems”, arising from a book or a chance encounter.

Rob A. Mackenzie's poems in The Opposite of Cabbage are more self-conscious and densely populated than the others. Examples include A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses His Star Pupil and Advice from the Lion Tamer to the Poetry Critic. But Patenting The is profound and matches form to content by avoiding the definite article.

“The” is in all three of these titles, but Balmer's meditation on the possibilities of connection and difference across the centuries questions individual need. Instead she offers the hope of genuine understanding and the peace of reconciliation.

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