Powell may well be his generation's best poet, one of the best now writing. His fourth book tells of love found and lost against the backdrop of disease and pop culture.

Zucker's best book yet tells a series of harrowing domestic stories, reminding us that the scariest place to be is often at home with the family.

Revell is once again in fine form, finding the places where religious faith and experimental poetry converge.

Classicist Mendelsohn never forgets that the great books are always about right now, making him the ideal translator for Cavafy, who saw ancient history everywhere in turn-of-the-20th-century Greece. This will be the standard edition of Cavafy for the foreseeable future.

McHugh is as quirky and playful as ever, but now haunting questions of mortality have crept into her poems.