The war of wills and patience that unfolds during a siege has been the subject of powerful storytelling for millennia, and won't lose its appeal any time soon: Homer's epic poem The Iliad, written around the seventh or eighth century BC, tells the story of the Greek siege of the city of Troy; almost 3,000 years later the script of the 2002 Hollywood film Panic Room spun a yarn about a mother and child trapped by a gang of burglars in a secure room in their upmarket Manhattan apartment, and sold for a reputed $1 million after a fierce bidding war between rival studios.

The trio of works from New Writing 15 that fall under the siege rubric each address very different aspects of the word.

In Selma Dabbagh's 'Down the Market', the siege began long before the story begins, and will no doubt continue for a long time: it is the terrible standoff between militant Jewish settlers and Arab villagers in the occupied territory of the West Bank. Dabbagh's narrator, a Jewish boy visiting from London, doesn't seem to have any understanding of the seething tensions of the land he has stepped into, until he is the unwilling witness to a scene of racism and brutal violence.

The sieges of Robin Robertson's 'Territorial' and Jean Sprackland's, 'The Stopped Train' are altogether more lightly evoked. In the delicately observed poem 'Territorial' the poet watches, and is watched by, a cat as she stakes her claim to her territory: no intruder is going to take her by surprise.

'The Stopped Train', too, is threaded with humour, as the poet gets inside the mind of a train broken down somewhere in the English countryside. The trapped passengers are angry enough that they can't get reception on their mobile phones, but they are also besieged, by the 'sly ditches and flat fields' of the outside world, which is just waiting to strike them down 'like stranded motorists in Death Valley'. This is a siege all right, but the train, ticking as the heat leaves her metal, couldn't care less.

Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His most recent book is a selection of free English versions of poems by Tomas Transtromer, The Deleted World. He has received numerous awards for his work, and his third book of poetry, Swithering, recently won the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Selma Dabbagh

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer whose work has appeared in Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women (ed. J. Glanville, Telegram) and in the Fish anthologies of 2004 and 2005, which comprise the winning entries to the Irish Publisher's International Short Stories Competitions. She was English PEN's nominee for International PEN's David T. K. Wong Prize 2005.

Jean Sprackland

Jean Sprackland's second book of poems, Hard Water (Cape, 2003), was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Photo: Caroline Forbes

Illustration © Maurizio Marmorato