Their bow-tied drivers now deliver meals to 8000 Londoners a week according to spokeswoman Andrea Nelson who emphasises that

Their bow-tied drivers now deliver meals to 8,000 Londoners a week, according to spokeswoman Andrea Nelson, who emphasises that they are not another fast-food service, but cater for people who want to eat in but eat well. Customers include everyone from companies to girls on a night in, from parents with new babies to, of course, those who want to cunningly impress guests. These days, you don't have to restrict yourself to the curry house on the corner or the local pizza place, you can now order food from dozens of different London restaurants and have it delivered courtesy of one of the capital's restaurant delivery services. It's late on Saturday evening, you've got friends arriving in less than an hour to watch The Eurovision Song Contest (it's finally okay to come out of the closet and admit you enjoy it), but there's no food in the house, or there is, but you can't be bothered to cook What do you do? Pick up the phone. It speaks to the eye, but the mind has no eye." The best poetic expression of this rare gift occurs in "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide", a spine-tingling account of dread and isolation abroad Loneliness breathes off the pages of Carson's work.

But then, it is present to some degree in all these poets: the loneliness of the long-distance love-poet, perhaps?. Others, and presumably the poet herself, may feel that the banal prosy parts are necessary relief, so vividly is the pain focused elsewhere. It appears both in images (iced landscape, blasted trees) and sorrowful generalisations: "the hardest thing about losing a lover is/ to watch the year repeat its days."This poem is constantly loosening and tightening. When not seeking relief from its own intensities, it has a fierce bravery that is indeed reminiscent of Emily Bronte: "Everything I know about love and its necessities/ I learned in that one moment/ when I found myself/ thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon/ at a man who no longer cherished me."Carson is a moral philosopher with a Pascalian flair for aphorism: "TV is inherently cynical.

Now the womanly erotic, with all its self-conscious demandingness and mad generosity, can be allowed to invent - in Auden's phrase - "new styles of architecture" to match the change of heart."The Glass Essay", the opening sequence of Anne Carson's selected poems Glass and God, is a memoir that recalls love and rejection with a man named Law, and interweaves it with a poetic essay on Emily Bronte. Carson, a Canadian writer, pushes the formal boundaries wider than the other poets here. She is immensely skilled in free verse and prose-poetry (if we're allowed to dust off an unfairly discredited term), but I feel uneasy when her academic's voice encroaches on the poetic. These poems may not be sonnets, but they are strongly constructed. Strong forms are certainly needed to encapsulate the imaginative exuberance, the reckless magic-realism of poems that go anywhere: into space, to Brazil and Kazhakstan, to "neon, nitrogen and old stars", while remaining in the moonlit room with "Blue Velvet syruping away on the tape". ("Deep Blue").Women poets in the past took over the tradition and subverted it by stealth: Elizabeth Barratt Browning, for example, who subtly promotes her own female point of view in Sonnets from the Portuguese, while retaining formal and rhetorical decorum We live at a more interestingly dangerous juncture.

The modern world is raided for metaphor, occasionally mixed a bit too boldly: "It's a website of alien muscles/ losing their hair-trigger touch on a soul/ Blowing Christ knows where" (which describes the lover's body as he falls asleep).Padel's linguistic energy presses at the edge of form, without destroying it. Perhaps we should simply recoup love to include wild flowers and spawning salmon, as well as Liz and Dave in flagrante.With Ruth Padel's new collection, we enter a different realm. The love story itself has fewer emotional cliches than those told by Sewell and Falck It does not chart a "rise and fall". Rather, disappointment, uncertainty and absence are built into the erotic adventure from the start: "the folk- song called/ Not-Here-Most-of-the-Time".Immediacy is Padel's keynote: the sense of describing events as they happen, not in tranquil recollection. Such urgencies, at the level of diction and rhythm, give the book the quality of a breakthrough. Whereas Sewell's work describes muscular sex, Padel's has the effect of seeming to enact it.The diction can be almost ruthlessly slangy: "So you think I don't give a toss/ How you work your ass off?/ Hmmmm It's in me all the time, plus/ Other looking-after stuff/ I can't keep my mind free of" ("Myths of the Origin of Fire").