After a lifetime of travelling, and six books of poetry on the move, Landeg White in "Arab Work" is trying something new - with poems about settling, building and planting in a country where he is a stranger. His chosen forms - lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium - point to a new engagement with British tradition; but his older themes are still present, as poetry fights back in an embattled world with tenderness and lyricism, celebrations of family love and the ramshackle heroism of ordinary people.