Distracting himself from the depths he's too frightened to face by playing George Formby tunes on his banjo, Corin Redgrave's damaged silly-ass Duke is like the little boy the couple never had.Amanda Donohoe's Duchess - pulling her features into various DIY facelift poses and employing diphthongs that make Loyd Grossman sound like Dolly Parton - doesn't look too sad at having only one baby around the house. The Bahamas gig affords them lots of leisure, though, to pick at the scab of a seven-year marriage for which he had sacrificed a throne and she had, to all intents and purposes, sacrificed the right ever to divorce again.The play is alive to the grotesque comedy of the situation (the little porno-nursery games the fretful, slighted couple play, like squirreling Queen Mary's jewels in a place that would faze the most hardened Customs official). In the diplomatic pecking order, this is Siberia with add-on humidity. How it rankles with them, though precisely what higher posting a wartime government could have given an ex-king with pro-Hitler sympathies is hard to say. This two-hander is an altogether more astringent and blackly stylish piece of work than that grovelling musical which, conveniently amnesiac about the Duke's Fuhrer-fancying and hopes of making a crowned comeback in a Nazi Britain, despatched the lovebirds to a married future of unclouded happiness. HRH puts the record straight on that little fantasy.

We meet up with the Windsors in 1943, when the Duke was Governor-General of the Bahamas. A two-hander for Corin Redgrave and Amanda Donohoe, it takes up the tale where 'Always', the musical, all too suddenly left off. The ex-king is dead, long live the ex-king! We've hardly drawn breath since conducting the funeral rites over Always and now here are the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson experiencing a speedy theatrical resurrection in Snoo Wilson's HRH. 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"..

Snoo Wilson's 'HRH' catches up with Edward and Mrs Simpson in the Bahamas in the 1940s. 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 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. 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.