American publishers of new poetry almost invariably print a picture of the poet to accompany his or her book, usually on the back cover, sometimes as a frontispiece, or as a detached extra page slipped in among the end-papers. Five of the books under review are translations (or quasi-translations) and we are in the main spared photographs in these cases; the remaining seven all offer photographs-one woman and six men. You read a poem and then turn to the usually staringly ingenuous picture -'Did you write that? Well, well . . .' Something quickly strikes you-the incidence of beards is far higher than in the general population-four of our six have variously hirsute chins. 'What can that mean?' you wonder. I think it means we are keeping company with what Harold Rosenberg called 'the herd of independent minds', a hunch confirmed by most of the poems. Perhaps significantly, the best of the books considered here is by one of the two unbearded bards.

I begin with the translations. The best of these, by a wide margin, is Gentleman, Single, Refined, selected poems of the Swedish writer Hjalmar Gullberg, translated by Judith Moffett. The poems referred to in the title form a comic sequence, distantly modelled on Morgenstern's Palmström poems, describing the life and thoughts of a shy, not very successful academic. They are translated with considerable linguistic panache; the decision to reproduce the poems' rhyme schemes, a risky one for a less skilful translator, pays off in ...