Books: Independent choice: Poetry

Linda France edited the influential Bloodaxe anthology Sixty Women Poets, and her own work provides further evidence that much of the most energetic, vital poetry today is by women. Her exuberant first collection, Red, compared love unfavourably with jazz: "If love was jazz,/I'd always want more/I'd be a regular/On that smoky dance-floor." Her third collection, Storyville (Bloodaxe, pounds 6.95), devotes a section to this connection. The result, like the music, is very seductive.

The first poem, "Mess With It" is bursting with sexual imagery: "It creeps up behind you on all fours,/a reed between its teeth, so quiet/you barely notice. Until it's too late: /smoky breath tickles your neck keening/its sweetness and you toss back your head/in red surrender." There's a range of voices in these celebratory poems: some terse American drawls, driven by a punchy rhythm, full of alliteration; others displaying remarkable formal control. "Blues for Bird", a beautiful tribute to Charlie Parker, uses the discipline of a sestina to play with the image of a trapped bird, glass and a horn. The title-piece - a sequence about falling in love - deploys different forms and rhythms to reflect the changing moods and movements of jazz pieces.

The longest section, "Home Movies", focuses on the act of remembering and making sense of the past. A few of the poems here feel a little tricksy, but France can also write convincingly about the grittier sides of urban life, from working in "The Meat Factory" to living in "Chip City". Her section about the grim reality of being "On the Game" manages to sound both tough and authentic.

Eva Salzman's voice is, if anything, even tougher. Born in New York, she has lived in Britain since 1985 and her first collection, The English Earthquake, casts a laconic and often merciless gaze on English life. In Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford, pounds 6.99), her capacity for disturbing surrealism has intensified. Many of the poems are taut pieces that use strange and elliptical images to explore the complexities and compromises of sexual relationships.

In "Masques", she draws on the myths of the Muses in a sequence of playful poems that aim to combine classical kudos with contemporary nous. The final section, "Poor Relations", includes impressive poems about family relationships, many achieving their startling effect through a powerful tension between their controlled surfaces and huge undercurrents of anger and bitterness.

Wild Workshop (Faber, pounds 8.99) - three long poems by women poets, each of which appears to exorcise a love affair - is wild indeed. It takes its title from Charlotte Bronte's comment on Wuthering Heights, that the soul is "hewn in a wild workshop". Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" deals explicitly with this theme and is by far the most interesting. This idiosyncratic account of a woman obsessed by lost love and by Emily Bronte is an intriguing collage of wry observation, dreams, psychobabble and litcrit. It is followed by Kay Adshead's grotesque satire on sexuality, "The Slug Sabbatical", over 62 nauseating pages; and Bridget Meeds' deadpan account of a lovelorn American student working in a Belfast pizza joint. It's good to take risks, but there's not much here to suggest, as Linda France does in an early poem, that "poetry/ positively explodes like a bomb when you touch it".