The everyman and the empire

"Some flicker briefly, gain a measure of success/cash in, crash out, sell out, sell up, repeat/themselves, play dumb, dumb down, fall by the wayside or/settle for being set up for life... creep to Academe/imbibing slime as stooges of the status quo/or else, plainly astute, play the Established Whore."

Alexis Lykiard's new collection Unholy Empires (Anarchios Press, £7.99) is a splendidly barbed book, spiked with Lykiard's usual "saeva indignatio."

He writes with precision and wit about the culture of dishonesty that sustains all bloody empires. "Different arsehole, same old shit," he writes. In such a climate, he argues, poets must "work as best they can, loath to betray/whatever legacies remain."

This is a book of "various verses versus." And there is a lot for Lykiard to stand against - the "present crop of blind fools and bland crooks," "cretinous warmongers," "vile hypocrites" and "unmitigated shits" and all the sycophantic writers who contribute to the erasure of historical memory.

The first half of Tom Kelly's Dreamers in a Cold Climate (Red Squirrel, £6.99) is a series of bleak, tender monochrome portraits of growing up in Jarrow in the 1960s. "Speak when spoken to/worry when teachers shout." "You joined the gang/or ran every play time/away from fists and kicks."

The second half of the book is a long sequence about a Geordie everyman, a skilled worker and grafter who is bewildered by "life after work." "Th' Japanese took wa ships/giv'us bloody karaoke/Not much of aa swop."

It is a beautiful elegy to work and to the industrial working class. "Thatcher was shameless/Greed: mak' th' rich richor/'Where'd that leave us?'/Ask every miner/steel workers at Consett/shipyards: aal gone/Black days and neets."

All Things Tire of Themselves (Flambard, £8) is Arnold Wesker's first book of poems. In places, it is curiously old-fashioned, heavy with grammatical inversions and rhetorical questions. But it is a fascinating footnote to the life of a great playwright.

It is also a lovely study of growing old, a painful exploring of what Wesker calls "the stumbling age" when "Old men fear never waking again," "Old men sit wondering at themselves" and "Old men forget the gap between/Ambition and lapsed energy."

And there are some gorgeous poems about growing up in the East End and about being young, sharp recollections of a time when life was an unread book. "I want not to have read/Dead Souls, Bovary/Hardy, Lawrence, Orlando/Father and Sons/John Donne/Penguins stacked ready/And all my years before me."

Few contemporary poets have enjoyed - or deserved - more success than Jackie Kay. She continues to attract critical acclaim, big literary prizes and the warm admiration of her many readers.

Darling: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £9.95) draws on her four major collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask. It also includes a selection from her children's books and some new poems, including the beautiful title poem.

No contemporary poet writes so well about identity, colour, class, sexuality and memory as Kay. Her work is always grounded in ordinary life and affectionate good humour - especially the Ma Broon poems - characterised by kindliness and generosity.

Like Wesker, she grew up in a communist household. Her first poems, written when she was in the YCL, were published in this paper.

She has continued to honour her family and the political culture of radical Glasgow in poems such as The Adoption Papers, Colouring In, Watching People Sing and the wonderful The Shoes of Dead Comrades. "On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades/It scares me half to death to consider/that one day it won't be Wullie or Jimmy or Arthur/that one day someone will wear the shoes of my father/the brown and black leather of all the dead comrades."