Dwarves are more inventive lovers than kings

(Dwarves are more inventive lovers than kings.) Of two princesses in towers, one disappears in her image, incised by visitors on the glass; the other grows old, tranquilly unvisited."Towers", oldworld walls in which women self-box their lives, are Diski's target. Indeed, this insensitivity precipitated suicide: the "leaper" was the woman's lover. The writer scuttles back to the OK asylum of her own life."It might be worse." The message flickers through fairytale too. The elegant stranger can't talk writing to a writer, although she tries: a crime of insensitivity which foreshadows the revelation of worse. In a tube-station crowd after a "leaper" (a suicide), a writer meets an elegant woman with whom she has great, surprised sex: "I thought I had everything. Found, at last, the solution to the panic that threatened to swamp me I remember the quality of that moment, even now.

It was, I think, the first and only time I really felt everything was going to be all right."Like all Diski bliss-dreams, this one implodes. A perfectly sane teenager, doomed to endless foxtrots in mental hospital, has been unhappy enough to know this is "asylum in the old, true sense of the word...by no means the worst she could imagine". As in Diski's novels, domesticity is trumped by a bizarrely inside-out way of seeing Living the bizarre is safer, if you can manage it. The woman in these stories (all the protagonists are women) who gets things really right is obsessively jealous, happy only when her lover is obviously unfaithful That's the tone. The resulting yarns fall between more stools than you could shake your mushy peas at.. THE Diski voice is a dry smile at dreams of life coming right. In Milner Place's In a Rare Time of Rain (Chatto pounds 6.99) , macho tales of derring-do and gipsy women alternate with Llareggub-style renditions of Yorkshire "characters" with Rabelaisian names living it up in caffs and allotments.

Grief of one sort or another is her main theme, sometimes laid on a bit thick, but convincing and dignified at its best. See the title poem of The Earthquake (Rockingham Press pounds 5.95), an expert, unstiff villanelle, for what she can do. Her pieties tend to arrive well wrapped in old tissue paper - "the stars breath on his face", "silences define us" - and her stories come mostly from the history books. Even Tony Curtis buys into these "pastoral lies", as Patrick Kavanagh once called them, looking back ruefully at his own excesses.

Elsewhere Curtis contrasts the horrors of war with "the harvest...of love", "summer in the soul", or a daughter's innocence and grief. Not much of it rises above stock juxtapositions, moral point-scoring and touching the hems of other people's poems.Lottie Kramer has been quietly building a reputation for years. "Poor woman - who is love and life/And an everlasting cry/Towards the hand of man//Whose hand is on the gun" So that's all sorted then. Me Jane, you a bloodthirsty bastard not worthy to consort with my sensuous womanhood and ineffable logic.Evans's island is Bardsey, once a site of medieval pilgrimage, now "A tiny community of individuals/thrown together as on a voyage".

But men threaten to import violence and "blood" into the unspoilt snow in her garden. Earle likens herself to "many a woman", to "the geisha...skating the thinnest ice". Better to take a look at Sibyl Ruth's Nothing Personal (Iron Press pounds 5.50), an engagingly frank first book which is naive and clumsy but seldom dull, "each part of speech an occasion of lust", as it should be.And so to Wales, in the company of Jean Earle's The Sun in the West, Christine Evans's The Island of Dark Horses and Tony Curtis's War Voices (Seren Books pounds 5.99 each). Vendler on verse is a bit like finding an ice cube in your malt.