This isn't the usual sort of writer's manual or self help book. For a start, there is very little about formal technique - that's not what it's about. It's about the process and not the result. The assertion here is that, in writing as well as in life, what you do isn't as important as how you do it. And how you do it is about change and transformation.

I hope that doesn't sound offputtingly abstract - there's plenty of practical advice here, although some of that may be a bit unexpected too. Among other things, we are shown how to lower our standards, forget about trying harder, and to borrow liberally and creatively from other writers. More challenging still, we are reminded that the less we do, the more we are likely to experience.

Many of these ideas come directly from the writer's Buddhist practice, and indeed the way the book is written feels profoundly Buddhist - in its warmth, its language, its seriousness and in its playful paradoxes. Billed as a how-to-write book, you could almost use Writing your Way as a how-to-meditate book too, or even as how-to-live-your-life. For Manjusvara there is no reason to see these as separate activities.

He is very clear that writing, meditation and life give us the opportunity and the ability to change our basic emotional patterns, as well as making it obvious why we might need to, and what we have to gain. Some very moving personal details back this up, both from Manjusvara himself and from his students. The process is made to feel exciting and liberating rather than daunting, by the kindness of the tone, the openness of the author to sharing his own experience, and the practicality of the exercises. Writing your Way starts and ends with the deceptively simple sounding task of dealing with distractions, and pads purposefully through the other big issues of life, as well as of writing, like the struggle to be authentic, the search for wholeness and the desire to find order in the apparent chaos that surrounds us.

In the tradition of Buddhist teachers, Manjusvara takes very little credit for the thoughts and ideas he presents. He quotes liberally, and acknowledges generously, and not always from the sources you'd expect. There are lines here from Tibetan monks, John Cage and from the guys at the local car repair shop. Well-chosen poems and pieces of prose illustrate his points too, not just from William Blake, Emily Dickinson or Seamus Heaney, but also from many people who have discovered their writing voices through the Wolf at the Door writing workshops.

Some of the dozens of suggestions that I found really helpful were when and why you might want to try writing with the "wrong" hand, how to hear the difference in letter sounds to improve the way your writing dances along, and how to use playing cards to break away from cautious language habits.

The more profound lesson though was to be receptive to my own creativity, and to keep on bringing the wolf to the door.

Carrying the Elephant is made up of 72 untitled, and mostly very short, prose poems, picking out vivid scenes from Michael Rosen's life so far, and then on to the next, which could be minutes or years later. The effect is a bit like shaking a kaleidoscope instead of turning it steadily.

Only around twenty of the pieces - embedded at the heart of the collection - deal directly with Rosen's son's sudden death from meningitis at the age of eighteen, but the pain and shock of that devastating event seem to spread outwards through the whole collection. Or maybe that's just how it seemed to me. I bought this book when I was desperately struggling with a very similar loss, frantically grabbing at poetry to distill feelings that prose somehow couldn't touch, feeling able to read half a page on a good day, when a whole book was impossible.

What Rosen does is to capture the unpredictable and the unacceptable - the feelings you probably wouldn't know about if you haven't been there, and the ones you'd probably hesitate to voice if you have. This is immensely liberating. Rosen is particularly good on conveying the inability to do normal things or think normal thoughts, and the even more frightening inability to know what you think or what you feel. And while that's happening, you've got other people's reactions to deal with somehow. Rosen gets it spot on with a deadpan account of a perfectly decent person getting it horribly wrong - the neighbour who nervously comments "Rather you than me" before going on to mention the football. Rosen follows this up with someone probably a lot closer to him getting it in the neck with the angry "Don't tell me that I mourn too much". Yes, that feeling sounds familiar. So does the loneliness and bewilderment of "I can't answer your question 'what can I say?' as I don't know what to say either." Or "You ask me how it's possible for me to carry on. I wonder if I look like someone who looks like it's possible to carry on".

So for me Carrying the Elephant works brilliantly as therapy. As poetry I'm not so sure. The pieces read like passages of very vivid, spare prose, with the rhythm and the line breaks in some, but certainly not others, cleverly conveying the feel of the content. There's not much metaphor and little conventional metre or rhyme, but maybe that's the point of a prose poem.

Anyway, the technique works well on page 61, a brusque and antagonistic exchange of letters with authority, the words and phrases tersely batted back and forth like in a tennis match. And in the more emotional poems, the jerky and disrupted feel does convey very powerfully the disjointed thoughts and incoherence of someone suffering deep pain and shock. The line breaks here act like a pause for breath in an obsessive monologue, or build up suspense and a sense of reluctance to say the unsayable, as on page 47 - "dear joe, your wild noisy huge brother (line break) is dead". The flatness of the minimal punctuation and no capitalisation adds to the devastation and desolation of the meaning.

For me though, a lot of the pieces just read like a paragraph or two of prose with the line breaks put in to make it look and feel like a poem. Reading about "the (line break) council" or "chanel (line break) no.5" can be pretty irritating unless the effect feels worthwhile and all too often it doesn't.

This is a minor quibble though - if the minimum definition of poetry is intensified speech then Carrying the Elephant says plenty that I needed to hear, and as intensely as I needed to hear it.

Peter Conradi began to explore Buddhism when terrifying panic attacks started to take over his life. As he points out early on in Going Buddhist, these claustrophobic free-floating terrors are hardly uncommon in the West, and nor is it uncommon to set off on a spiritual search at times of acute psychological distress. So what follows is an impressionistic view of an intensely personal journey, quirky, humorous and irreverent, but also a deeply serious look at issues that can affect us all.

Conradi's spiritual search is a highly western one. Despite many references to the eastern masters he has learnt from over the years, the ideas and insights he returns to again and again are, rather unexpectedly for me, those of his friend, novelist and academic Iris Murdoch. It's not all remembered conversations and anecdotes though - Conradi's introduction to the basics of Buddhism, its history and its geography is an elegant masterpiece of clarity.

For me, Conradi's main strength is a very personal description of his struggles with meditation - struggles that will feel very familiar to so many people. It is this combining of the personal with the general that makes the book so beguiling. To Conradi it is part of the human condition to feel alone, anxious, depressed and fearful of death, and equally clear that anyone can benefit from meditation. Again and again he returns to the practice of meditation. How to sit and what to sit on, whether it's okay to blow your nose, why meditation might actually make a difference to yourself and the world, and, every now and then, a glimpse of the pure joy that Conradi describes so eloquently.

Although the publisher's name would suggest that Going Buddhist is a short and simple read, I didn't really experience it like that. Conradi structures his book around a series of traditional drawings, illustrating a story of a boy and an ox. The drawings are circular and so is Conradi's story - beginning and ending inevitably with the words of Iris Murdoch. But it didn't actually feel formally structured. Conradi's ideas, thoughts and stories whirl around, whack you around the head and repeat themselves like the rampaging elephant or tree full of monkeys that characterise the mind's behaviour during meditation practice for so many of us. This isn't a criticism though. If Conradi's book has us following tangents, achieving calm, losing it again but feeling it's worth staying on the journey, then I'd say he's done a terrific job in conveying how it actually feels to go Buddhist.

I really struggled with The Corrections, repeatedly described as the most remarkable novel of our century to date. And reports of Franzen's snooty sounding behaviour to Oprah Winfrey didn't send me rushing to his other work either. Luckily I came across a reprint of Franzen's famous 1996 "Harper's Essay" when I had nothing else to read, and everything changed. That essay is reprinted here, with fourteen others, equally provocative, densely yet lucidly written, and all with a quite unexpected layer of humour, wit and self-deprecation.

Although the essays cover a wide range of subjects, from a surprisingly gripping forty page account of the chaos facing Chicago's postal service, through to a very moving piece on his father's decline into Alzheimer's disease, Franzen underpins them all with his central concern - the status of contemporary fiction and the lives of those who need it, in a postmodern, mass media saturated world.

For those of us who immediately recognise Franzen's experience of reading and/or writing as a means of reaching inward for a way out of loneliness, the modern world can be a very hard place to inhabit. Again and again he returns to the fragility of any community of readers and writers, the decline of the social novel, the rise of what he calls the tyranny of the literal. No longer simply finding it "apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read Henry James", Franzen moves on to examine some disturbing possible reasons for the ascendance of what he calls "technological consumerism" at the expense of personal integrity and dignity.

One particularly unsettling suggestion is that "the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structured to avoid the kinds of conflicts on which fiction . . has always thrived", with the finger being pointed at, among other targets, self-help literature, television and far too many prescriptions for anti-depressants. Well, clearly vast numbers of the world's population don't share the luxury of avoiding conflict with the average middle class white American male writer, but that just makes his point even more distressing in its implications.

His observations on the relationship between solitude, privacy, isolation and loneliness are thought provoking too. Although these are linked to his overall theme of the necessity of literature - "the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone" - they go much further than that, into the erosion of civic life and the meaninglessness of a shallow, consumerist definition of privacy which is purchased at the cost of meaningful shared human experience.

Does Franzen offer any ways forward out of this thoroughly depressing situation that he describes so exquisitely? Well, no, not really, more just a way of living with it. He calls this approach tragic realism and I find it strangely comforting to be sharing it with him.

Writing poems - it's a great title. Deceptively plain, it carries many possible meanings, most of which Sansom slings out before he starts.

From the back cover on, he makes it clear that he won't be telling us what kind of poems to write or how to write them. Instead he's offering something much more valuable - why to write poems and how to write them better.

Quite a chunk of the book examines the techniques of some well-chosen poets, making it almost as much about reading poems as writing them. This makes a lot of sense, given Sansom's strong belief that close reading must come before writing. Using the work of poets from John Keats to Carol Ann Duffy, he shows us in detail why they write poems so well.

He then takes us very readably through the formal forms, with endearingly opinionated opinions on them all, along with some good solid definitions of the spondees, dactyls and pentameters that can be so unnerving. He offers sound advice on choosing titles and explains just why we need to be careful of dangerous poetry words like shard.

There's a few writing exercises and games as well, though Sansom disconcertingly seems to think that we're going to be leading students through these, rather than using them ourselves. Evidently this is a book about teaching other people to write poems too.

Sansom repeats more than once that the poet should show rather than tell, persuade rather than insist. But since he's writing prose here, I guess it's okay that he playfully goes on to do quite a bit of insisting anyway.

For a start, he's pretty insistent on the value of the small magazines and marginal publishing that have done so much for today's poets, poetry and poetry readers. Well, true enough, and the question of where your poems might go once you've written them is certainly treated here in a more thought-provoking way than in the usual tedious cut and paste jobs straight from last year's Writers and Artists Yearbook.

Sansom is just as insistent on the importance of writing authentically - surely the most basic requirement for a poet and yet often so elusive. I found him particularly helpful on this point, though a bit surprised by his choice of poem to illustrate it.

The tone of Sansom's list of whose poems to read, and why, goes a little beyond the persuasive too. Fine by me - it's a very personal list and that makes it all the easier to trust.

There's no real shortage of people writing about writing. Unlike a lot of them, Peter Sansom is an accomplished poet with a track record of helping many others get there too. Hardly surprising then that his contribution is so practical and inspiring.

Twenty seven stories by twenty seven lesbians may well be a treat but it can feel a bit overfacing too. I did what most of us probably do and started with the dead certs. For me, Jackie Kay and Ali Smith are the big names in this collection and their stories are exquisite. Sure footed, not a word out of place and either of them would be worth the cover price alone. The big names turned not to be the only delights though. Some of the very small names in Groundswell are equally enchanting. Try Carter's story, Hot, for example.

Lesbian fiction has come a long way since the days when we'd put up with any old coming out story / falling in love with your best friend story / getting dumped for a man story. Nothing is off limits nowadays and the Groundswell girls cover a giddying range of subjects, themes and settings. The protagonists could be madwomen or they could be men, the period could be now, it could be the second world war or it could be seventeenth century New England. The characters could be engaging in the usual stuff of dyke life - getting thrown out of the pub, falling in love with a schoolteacher or having hot sex with figments of their imagination. But they're just as likely to be growing a new heart from seed, befriending a pig or falling in love with a tree.

The writers here are on the whole more experienced than those in the first Diva collection. Very few are first time writers, although they haven't all published short fiction before. They are as diverse in their style and approach as they are in their themes, with the tone going from comic to tragic through whimsical to surreal and back again.

With this kind of range, let alone the sheer number of stories, it would be unrealistic to expect every one to be a winnner for every reader. Personally, I could take or leave half a dozen or so, and with a couple of them I couldn't really keep up enough interest to finish. But I'm not complaining - I'd say there's a good twenty thought provoking and engaging stories here.

In these hundred poems, Selima Hill portrays her lover not only as a horse, a donkey, a zebra, but also as a bungalow, as a yellow camper van, as a wardrobe. The mood covers just as wide and weird a range too, with the person in the portraits skittering in Hill's mind like a cockroach, between a tyrant, an idol, a comforter and a boring irrelevance.

Jackie Kay has described Selima Hill's poetry as wonderfully disturbing, and never has this been more true than here. The startling images, the short sharp shock of everyday language twisted into extraordinary ideas, the daring assertions that spring out and slash to pieces all the certainties we thought we had about life and love.

This might make Portrait of my Lover as a Horse sound like a difficult book. It isn't. Or only in the sense of coping with what it might do to your life. If I could give one slim volume to someone who doesn't get poetry, this would be it. Most of the poems are only a few short lines long. All of the words are ones we've known since shildhood. It's the way she puts them together that is disturbingly wonderful.

Now and again, Alison Bechdel receives letters from women who experience Dykes To Watch Out For as more real than their own lives. Sound far-fetched? Probably not, if you've read enough of her books.

Bechdel's cartoons cover a vanishingly small segment of the population - lesbians, living a lesbian-defined lifestyle, in a sizeable and diverse lesbian community. Over the last couple of decades, her cast of characters have shared run-down houses, worked in radical bookstores, marched on the Pentagon, had donor-inseminated babies, and grappled with all the big ethical issues, from non-monogamy through bisexuality to the etiquette of removing a bra. Recognise any of this? Me too, and doesn't it feel good to see your reality reflected on the page for once? Especially when it's delivered with such perception, wit and style.

Or maybe you're a bit less familiar with Bechdel's world? Don't let that put you off - the quality of her work has won her a large following among all ages, genders, sexualities and politics. Whoever you are, she'll make you laugh and she'll make you think.

In this 1995 instalment of their (and some of our) lives, the DTWOF girls are reluctantly facing some challenging new issues, like getting a proper job, caring for sick and aging parents, and deciding whether transexuals are welcome at lesbian poetry readings. But as antidote to this harsh reality, Bechdel also gives us a delightful piece of nostalgia - a flashback of fifteen years to more innocent times for our heroines, a time of coming out, first love and the pleasures of uncomplicated idealism. Unlike the first two thirds of the book, this story hadn't already appeared as a syndicated strip, so it's a double delight.

Bechdel wouldn't know how to turn out a bad book, and Unnatural Dykes is another winner, but as her work progresses, the undertow of pain beneath the comedy gets more noticeable, as the DTWOF crowd face a harder and harder reality. Do we really want to be reminded of this, however gently humourous the reminder might be?

For me, the answer has to be yes. Lesbian life wasn't easy when Bechdel started cartooning and, with fewer illusions to cling to, it can feel even harder now. At least we have Alison Bechdel's wonderful books to help us laugh at ourselves as we find new ways to live it.

Ali Hassan Kuban was born in Nubia, where Egypt meets Africa, and spent most of his life surrounded by musicians in the Nubian enclaves of Cairo.

That's only half the story though. In the fifties, he was playing with black jazz musicians from Harlem. In the nineties he was touring the world. Throughout his long career he worked with musicians of many styles and nationalities, while always retaining his Nubian roots. Despite Kuban's diverse influences and his easy absorption of Western instruments into his music, the earthy, insistent, mesmerising rhythms of Nubia remain there like bedrock.

Kuban must have recorded many of these tracks when he was well into his sixties, and yet they have an energy and vitality that will put a smile on anyone's face. This isn't one of those CDs that you buy after hearing one terrific track (probably Henna or Habibi in this case) and then feel let down by a dull series of mediocre make-weights. Virtually every track's a winner.

This is a great party CD for anyone into Middle Eastern and / or African music and dance. Even if you're not, I'd give it a go. If you are physically able to get up and dance, I guarantee that you will.

It seems that you either like Pete McCarthy or you don't. Since The Road to McCarthy is pretty much volume two of McCarthy's Bar, it won't be too difficult for most of us to decide whether we want to read it.

This time around, McCarthy's lengthy pub crawls, sticky ferry trips and sporadic reflections on roots, religion and the heritage industry cover a wider area of the world map. Otherwise, it's really more of the same.

And that's fine by me. I love McCarthy's writing. I find it wry, witty, self-deprecating and deceptively sharp. And yes, it does make me laugh out loud on the bus. But beneath the blokey banter there are genuine and surprisingly subtle insights into some of the big issues facing twenty first century westerners.

For McCarthy, these are mostly to do with working out a sense of belonging in an increasingly dislocated, commercialised and globalising culture. Neither fully English nor fully Irish, and not truly at home in either place, it's not surprising that he uses travel writing to pursue his theme.

McCarthy is particularly good on the human need to build some kind of sensible narrative around our lives. Pointing out that no-one wants to live their life as experimental drama, he puts up quite a defence for the exploding interest in genealogy and the quest for a family story, which many of us have learnt to dismiss with a sophisticated sneer. He certainly pushed me to rethink that one.

Maybe it's an age thing - I probably wouldn't have felt this when I was twenty five - but I'm quite happy to give McCarthy's favourite themes a second go. And if they are surrounded by some entertaining but perceptive and thought provoking descriptions of his life and times in New York, Tasmania and several points in between, then that's fine too. Even if most of his life and times there are spent in scummy bars. Again.

But then, you may have experienced McCarthy's Bar as nothing more than a crass catalogue of repetitive drinking sessions in the company of a dull and irritating bore, whose main pastime is taking swipes at the English, the Irish and any other available nationality. In that case, The Road to McCarthy will probably seem like a cynical and lazy attempt to sell the same book twice.

You pay your money (or not) and you make your choice . . .