Book review / Written on the body

Skin by Tobias Hill, Faber, pounds 8.99 Slow Dance on the Fault Line by Donald Rawley, Flamingo, pounds 12.99

Skin by Tobias Hill,

Faber, pounds 8.99

Slow Dance on the Fault Line

by Donald Rawley,

Flamingo, pounds 12.99

Poets don't always have a knack for telling stories; but in the best cases, as in Dylan Thomas's short fictions, they produce work lit by a love of language and the feel of words on the tongue. Such pleasures are happily evident in two new volumes which show young poets taking on the demands of the short story.

Donald Rawley's Slow Dance on the Fault Line - subtitled "California Stories" - is alive with moments of sensuous description, whether of the scents of magnolia and orange blossom, the noise and irritation of the Santa Ana winds, or an October "arsonist's sky ... sore in its own skin, inflamed and livid". Rawley's is a hot, striving and merciless Los Angeles, haunted by Hollywood ghosts (Fatty Arbuckle and Sharon Tate) who tease the imaginations of his characters - people who are always trying to be noticed, to be known. As Rawley tartly notes, "The worst thing to be in Hollywood is to be completely unknown when you die."

Rawley has a talent reminiscent of David Leavitt's for easing himself into the minds of older women: wives and mothers and whores, and "women who married their men for their money and walked through the halls in an icy execution of not being." Since his characters generally lack that elusive gold of LA existence - fame - they must calm their disappointments with Valium, double Stolys or empty sex: "the numb rub when they straddle and pump, undoing the monotonies".

There's a heartlessness in some of these stories, as in the terminally ill woman of "Nirvana Drive" who coolly murders her ex-husband. But Rawley brings an odd, detached sympathy to this impressive range of characters - whether it's ambitious black actress Clarissa in the 1950s, who is consigned to playing slaves in Bible epics or Lena Horne's double; or the former Sixties starlet Sheila in "Taylor and the Mod Girls", who lives out her movie-free retirement in caring for her retarded paraplegic son and fixing drinks for her cooing, alcoholic friends.

A similar quality of detachment cools Tobias Hill's work. Hill's Skin crawls, and it may make your skin crawl too: Hill is a canny master of the uneasy and the alien, the slyly violent. His characters generally have one kind of displacement, if not several, walling them off from the world: Brazilian Rafael, afflicted by HIV as well as a memory disorder by which he can forget nothing, who comes to London to find his ex-lover; Finnish Anja, who killed her parents by driving drunk and crashing the car, now seeking solace in a job at the London zoo.

These stories are dense with words and sensation, and thin on plot or resolution. Hill creates a prose to pause over - "the kiss rasps like a match" or "we watched the ocean dance in its skin of sequins" - but sometimes he indulges a poet's bad habit of obscurity, jumbling names and geographies. He is nothing if not adventurous. One story tracks a Japanese woman's honeymoon in riot-ripped LA, another a grieving father's attempts to communicate with the ghosts of his dead daughters over the Internet.

"Zoo" is a hallucination-bright rendition of the surreality of zoo life and the raving dark edges of Camden Town, as Anja attempts to discover who is stealing creatures. The story ends in a conflagration of dead animals, formaldehyde and fire.

And then there's "Skin" itself, a long piece about a Japanese detective's obsessive search for the identity of a Yakuza criminal - burned to death by hydrochloric acid - whose body was covered with magnificent tattoos. His tale is interleaved with that of a man drawn into the Yakuza organisation shortly after the war. Hill covers this remote geography with an impressive vividness, noting the taste of pickled plums and rice, the smell of Japanese ink or the look of "grass-writing" calligraphy.

Hill is ambitious and insightful, careful, and a little brutal; he also succumbs at times to an overworked complexity, trying too hard to prove waht he can do. He has a storyteller's eagerness to climb into other people's skins, and a poetic uncertainty about what to do when he gets there.