The World's Two Smallest Humans, By Julia Copus

Julia Copus's collection of poems is warm, human and readable, without the wilful opacity of so much modern poetry.

Her themes are relationships, memories, lovers, families, children; she favours verbs of movement and change, such as "melt", "fall", "ripen", "wither", "rise", "throw", "lapse", "grow", "transmute", "agglutinate". In "Miss Jenkins", a poem about a retired teacher's memories, the second verse is a mirror-image of the first, so that the first line is the same as the last line, the second line the same as the penultimate line, and so on – a simple but clever device which effectively bodies the relationship between past and present.

The collection concludes with "Ghost", a lyrical suite of poems about trying to conceive via IVF (the world's two smallest humans, by the way, are fertilised eggs).