Look at your shoes

Poetry is flourishing, but how much of it is really good? Very little judging by my postbag as the Observer's poetry reader

Ian Hamilton has published just sixty poems in sixty years, but literary London has produced a surprisingly compelling Festschrift in his honour.

Kate Kellaway is disappointed by a little book about conversation which suffers from runaway enthusiasm undone by preciousness

Driven out of central London by size of family and purse, could she ever learn to love the suburbs?

Being a mother is hard but there may be help at hand