Iain Crichton Smith catches the underlying sinister element of the celebration of the night of dead souls.

The visitants may well be pupils from his English classes at Oban but are he and his companions merely dressed for a formal evening or has the poem moved out of the natural world into a darkly symbolic one? (Smith's New Collected Poems are published by Carcanet at £18.95).

HALLOWE'EN

Someone was playing the piano when quite suddenly

there they were standing in the room.

They would not sing or speak or tell their names.

Their skull faces blankly shifted round

as if they were studying us implacably.

"Yokels," one said. "Rustics," said another,

and truly they had come in out of the rain

with their masks tall and white and bony-looking.

"Macbeth," someone said, and someone, "Hamlet".

Or perhaps at least the "Elegy" by Gray.

The rain drummed on the roof and they were gone

in their muddy boots, squelching past cowering doors.

We looked at each other. It was graveyard time

as our black ties on our white shirts might say.