Poetry. Issue number nine of the handsomely produced Etruscan Reader features the work of Fred Beake, Nicholas Moore, and Meg Bateman. Fred Beake imports the rawness of Yorkshire dialect, the long-line elegaic, and the satirical machismo of the Latin poets. With an uncompromising refusal to make use of poetry's imagistic escape-hatches, Nicholas Moore stays close to his experience and his time in a way that recalls B. S. Johnson or the early Roy Fisher, admitting sensitive and sensual celebrations of a love whose only fault was that it didn't last. Meg Bateman's poems, published here in Gaelic with their English translations, possess the classical precision and strong singing tone to celebrate her people's loves, losses, battles, bereavements, achievements of character and community, combined with an often startling emotional candour.