Our Sweet Little Time by Hamish Ironside

Looking at the cover of Our Sweet Little Time, you'd be forgiven for expecting a jolly, evergreen jaunt through a year in the life of poet Hamish Ironside. But once inside, you realise that – like the poems themselves – the title is its own finely honed riddle, one that allows interpretations ranging from the joy and bounce in 'sweet' and 'little' to the fleetingness of what 'little time' we all have together.

And while there are certain themes you would expect of haiku – the cycles of nature, especially – there are also many you wouldn't: from DIY and learning to type, to drunken self-doubt and the evils of househunting. As we're taken through the months of the year, there's just as much that's raw and shocking as there is ethereal and Romantic:

"my daughter's screaming / settled by footage / of war in Iraq"

In each three-line gem we sway quickly between the blackly comic, the vaguely despairing, and the warmly reaffirming, from the bludgeoning of insects in May to the birth of a baby daughter in July: "making toy scissors / of the surgeon's knife / I cut her loose to life".

To convey this range of emotions in a single, stripped-bare medium, and to show such precision of control without hint of pretence, is no mean achievement. The writing is also neatly offset by the wacky illustrations of Barnaby Richards, which offer up not just decoration, but visual puzzles of their own. And together they bring life to the art of haiku as an enduring form of brain-training for poet and reader alike, and a wonderful one at that.

James Hogg