Well versed in war

To time-poor readers, poetry can seem to bear no weight at all; a passing fancy or (as John Burnside puts it here) a thin shadow, "something chill and slender in this world".

With sounds like these, who needs understanding?

Tome of the unknown war poet

A Cannes Film Festival winner and favourite, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is raw and unsentimental and features a masterclass performance by Jeong-Hie Yun as Mija at its centre.

Embracing the ghost at cold comfort farm

A welcome bit of reason to the rhyme

Simple and magical verses on conflicts and contrasts

What is great about the Poems on the Underground project is that it doesn't demand high commitment from the reader. The poems are short, easy to read, and the range is so wide and eclectic that if you don't like or get one poem, you'll be likely to like or get the next. This latest edition to collect the 300 "best" poems used for the project captures that spirit perfectly.

Forget this generous anthology's iffy title: it brings to mind the tick-box poetry-by-label one contributor – Tim Wells – gently mocks in "The 1980s are a Long Time Dead".

Laureate duties for a while eclipsed Andrew Motion's subtle and shifting light as a poet of quietly elegiac passion. The title poem of his latest collection evokes a painting by Spencer Gore; of that symbolic track, Motion writes that "you might say death/ but I prefer taking/ pains with the world".

She learnt her trade doing battle with rappers. Now Kate Tempest is going down a storm on the spoken-word circuit.

Pam Ayres' stated aim has always been to write "something with which the audience would identify", which tells us two things. First, these poems were never meant to be written down, but to be performed – and they do work better when one imagines Ayres reading them out. Second, that Ayres doesn't want to challenge her audience, or make them think again. She doesn't want to defamiliarise existence, but to familiarise it.

Peter Ackroyd has done the general reader a service with this Greatest Hits selection; a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poems and 14 of his most memorable tales. The poems are light on meaning but strong on atmosphere and euphony. Poe's 19th-century American prose style can be tiresomely stodgy, but his peculiar morbid genius shines through. The title story is a brilliant evocation of psychological horror. I'm wondering now, as I wondered the first time I read it, what was actually in the pit?