Rollinson too begins with the body, almost prosaically - "I crack the shell/on the bedstead and open it/over your stomach, ("Like the Blowing of Birds Eggs") - then, like Olds, opens the poem up with a daring image, frequently charged with unexpected tenderness: "it moves on your skin like a woman/hurrying on in her yellow dress, the long/ transparent train dragging behind".Eleanor Brown brings more formality to the consideration of sex in her debut collection, Maiden Speech (Bloodaxe, pounds 6.95). Readers new to Olds will be astounded not simply by the frankness of poems such as "Celibacy at Twenty" - "I would move as little/as possible, the air seemed to press on my skin, my/ breasts like something broken open, un-/capped and not covered" - but also by its effortless, metaphysical movement from the body to a consideration of the nature of human love and what it means to have not yet experienced it. This is partly a feminist project, of course, following French theorist Helen Cixous's famous injunction, to "write the body", and so give a voice to the traditionally silent area of women's physicality and desire. In this area, the American Sharon Olds has been pre-eminent. Olds remains too little-known in the UK: it is good, therefore, to see her latest collection, The Wellspring, brought straight to us in a glamorous gold binding by Cape (pounds 7.00).

The Metaphysicals turned their mistresses into maps or diagrams, the late Victorians were obsessed with anything poking out of robes, with warm breath and marbly limbs, Eliot lingered on decay. For today's poets, the body is oozing, breeding, sexual and often examined in scientific detail. This epic of the Isle of Wight's literary apogee is virtually the perfect summer book No deck-chair will be complete without it.. Each generation of poets brings its own preoccupations to its depictions of the body.