Competing With the Piano Tuner by Tim Liardet. Seren, 63 pp., £7.95. The Milk Thief by Paul Henry. Seren, 64 pp., £6.95. Signs Round a Dead Body by Deryn Rees-Jones. Seren, 63 pp., £6.95. Reviewed by Anthony Wilson Here are three attractive books from Seren, all doing different things and all with things to recommend them. Tim Liardet (photo: book-lined room, CAT boots) observes hosepipe bans, towers, taxi drivers and actors with a cool eye "that loiters, and sees everything" ("The Sunbather," "The Binoculars"). The following is from "High Summer Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Five:" 'The garden / in the mirror's a lunar fresco, the dream of air / rolls through the pipes and night is drip-fed / from ledge to ledge of our vertebrae / into its rock-pools mere vapour, a flourescence of crystals." One is drawn to the poem's sensuality, moving from images of light to those of sound, to those of sweat and skin. And here is a mirror in the back of a Peugeot truck:                 It is in with the ripped out sinks, the sofa springs' dying octaves,                 it is with the builder's rubble that is valueless.                 Now that its silver leaf is                 peeling off, it is pond water with gleams beneath the surface.                                                   ("Mirror Angled at Sky") Liardet's wit isn't only apparent in poems where his observational skill are to the fore, however. There are some fine monologues, most notably "The Scutters' Song," capturing the female "talk which / was never once intended for [men's] ears" of a fishery, and which "striped the fathoms like the sunlight from above." "Olga Speaking Broken English" gives us a dancer from Estonia sending money home, and is reminiscent of the very best of Carol Ann Duffy. If sharp observation shaped by wit and not a little learning is what you crave, Liardet's your man. Paul Henry (dark coat, cliff-face, scarf) doesn't do wit in the same way as Liardet but does people, lots of them, lovingly and well. The Milk Thief is in three sections, beginning with domestic and family pieces ("Aber"), moving through portraits of female relatives ("The Visitors") and closing with the city-life of "Newport East." "The Park Girls," from the latter, reminds one of Terry Street-period Douglas Dunn:                                 In the searchlights of a car                                 they balance on heels, arms out                                 like novice tight-rope walkers.                                 Even the rain can't tame them.                                 They shelter inside the arms                                 of a tree and start to sing. "The Last Throws of Summer," about the British Boomerang Champion, glimpses "the boomerang tide's / endlessly perfected curve," the "childless back seat" of his frequently moved car and his "lightweight signatures in the sand." It's easy to like these moments, in spite of some inevitable-sounding lines on "craft and technique" which the poem neither earns nor needs. Elsewhere, there is a pier "that creaks and leans out too far / on its zimmer- frame" ("The Hourglass"); "a nail's sundial" fading on a bedroom wall ("Moving On"); "the haloes rinsed blue" of a coffee morning ("Waunfawr"); and "Boats, like fallen window-boxes" ("The Glebelands") to enjoy. It's a quiet but not undemonstrative collection, whose most successful attempts at honouring "somewhere less picturesque" ("Hook and Needle") recall David Scott's bridging between the sacred and the everyday. Deryn Rees-Jones (studio portrait, friendly grin) is already a Young Poetry Star and if you are a fan you will find plenty to enjoy in Signs Round a Dead Body. Most admirable about her work is that she goes for it in nearly every poem, truthfully and unashamedly singing. One of her titles, "What It's Like To Be Alive," could summarize her whole project. Or as she says in part 1 of "Spells," "I want to spell out all / the harboured messages of joy, make an alphabet / of our hands and bodies, rewrite our movements, / make everything strange." The book comes in four sections. The middle two take their inspiration from Neruda's "Songs of Despair" (which Rees-Jones steals for the title of part 2) which are by turns tender, erotic, funny and painful. In "Song to Noise" she says: "SI call on you and your gongs and cymbals / in all your ragged might / to beat your wings against the silence of death / for love, or what stands for love, or life." Rees-Jones stands for vivacity, which includes "Sizewell beach at midnight" and an inventory of facts about snow, making out, wolves, clouds, sheep, and her father's hair. I can't think of higher praise than that. Anthony Wilson's books include How Far From Here Is Home? (Stride), The Difference (Aldeburgh Poetry Trust) and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, for which he is poet-in-residence for primary education). This review first appeared in Orbis magazine; reprinted with permission.