I read Dennis O'Driscoll's The Bottom Line in the train on the way to work. This was appropriate because it deals with office life, a subject usually ignored by poets. Business is something of a blind spot in contemporary culture, no doubt because most writers and artists have got where they are by a determination to avoid it. And yet offices are fascinating places.

The fifty poems are written in an 11-line monologue form which reads sometimes like an extended haiku, sometimes like a shortened free-verse sonnet. One might call them poetic memos. There are, apparently, several speakers, (and a few poems are in the second person) but as the subjects are all male executives and novelistic characterization is not on the agenda, their identities tend to merge into each other. The business jargon is caught perfectly:
 

I scan the vacancies (self-starter,
forward-thinking, profit-responsible,
independent but committed to group
culture),
reading my future here in black and
white,
in terms I can relate to, a proactive role.

There are many evocative vignettes: a new recruit speed-reads his introductory pack of information about the firm, the belts of trench-coats flap in the wind as executives hold an impromptu meeting in the car park, an apple on a desk:

… deep green, high gloss,
with waxen sheen, a tea-break snack,
glows among the acetate reports,
symbolising something you can't name
...