STUART LAYCOCK visited Bosnia seven times with a medical charity during the civil wars in Yugoslavia and Zone: Poems of the Bosnian War (Mica Press, £7) recalls his experiences in a country “heavy with history and death.../where the 20th century stops/where it slumps into piled earth grave/wooden marker post thrust/stake-like into its vampire heart.”

Those and other lines exemplify how Laycock is especially good at describing the bleak details of a landscape transformed by war:

“The lamp-post is/a thing of almost strange beauty,/something that belongs perhaps/in a plush West End art gallery,/or a fine white-walled museum./Transformed by the/frontline’s flying metal/from solid pillar to a/delicate lace-like structure... pierced/time and time again/by bullets and shells.”