This might be a bit left-field, even by the standards of this column, but give it a go: a novel written in Pushkin sonnets, set in an alternative 1948, in which Britain is run by a Labour/Communist alliance, the iron curtain extends to the Channel, the royal family is in Rhodesia and Churchill has fled to Washington DC. It is, while we're at it, a murder mystery heavily shaded in tones of noir. (Although London is still hosting the Olympics, where the poem climaxes.)

As we know (whether it's a myth or not I am no longer sure) Orwell wanted to call his book 1948 but the publishers cavilled. Here, Winston Smith is a down-trodden detective constable, who is about to meet a contact who will, in classic fashion, be murdered in a suitably grim dockyard. O'Brien is his boss, and Julia the lady he is walking out with, but who keeps repulsing his attempts to, erm, have his way with her (this is 1948, after all). It begins with the same words as Nineteen Eighty-Four  and then sends itself up. The third line is an audacious presumption on the reader's indulgence, a potential hostage to fortune  but it still made me laugh out loud: "It was a bright cold day in April. / Oh no it wasn't  for a start / I cannot find a rhyme for April"... and on we go.

Now, a couple of caveats. Bear in mind that there is something inherently comic and subversive in the form that Croft has chosen, so it would perhaps be best if you did not really approach it as a whodunnit. Or even, in some respects, as a poem. Even though its prosody is spot-on. For example, there's a bit early on when you might fancy you can hear a note of Eliot in the background:

He climbs the steps, but no one's there.
The moon comes out. A wharf-rat scurries
Behind the gantry's silhouette.
Smith lights another cigarette.

Fine indeed; very fine, really, perfectly precise and commanding. But the next stanza, after three more lines of atmospheric scene-setting, then has, in brackets, the line "Oh god, this could go on all night", and then, two lines later, "this sort of stuff is not in my line" (odd emphasis so it rhymes with "skyline").

And so, several times throughout the poem. It is full of digressions, which if you are unprepared or impatient you might find a little irritating after a while, or might be there simply as padding. (In other words, doing exactly the same thing that he is accusing his descriptive passages of doing.)

But there is a beating heart here; it is not an inert exercise by any means. It is as if Croft has given Orwell back his original title  but in doing so, he has had to remake the universe. Which leaves him room for the really good bit: chapter 5, in which a tired and emotional Winston Smith stumbles upon a book that has been left in his room: none other than 1984, by George Orwell. Now, this being an alternative universe, Orwell's dystopia is not the one originally described. It becomes pretty clear that the world in his book is our current one: in other words, the neo-liberal, free market world. Not the same nightmare; another one.

The Soviet Union's somehow
vanished,
The Third World's locked in endless
debt,
Ideas of progress are long banished,
And Human Rights are just a threat,
And bankers help themselves to
bonuses
With appetites as large as Kronos's

(Referring, as I'm sure you know, to the god who ate his own children.) It's at this point that the hairs go up on the back of the neck, and I suspect that this is the pivotal section around which Croft wrote the rest of the poem. This central gravitational pull does not, however, unbalance the rest of it, which is, as his chosen form demands, chatty and zippy, but not stupid. The price is a bit steep for 90 pages, but this a small press that could do with a leg-up, and it also has fine illustrations by Martin Rowson.