ALISON CARR’S Corner Shop Cowgirl (Iron Press, £7) is one of the most original poetry books of the year, cleverly imagining her native Co Durham as a lawless Wild West landscape of tumbleweed towns, one-armed bandits, line-dancers, outlaws and the “coyote calls of men without work.”

Between the Indian takeaways and the empty charity shops lies the “Lost Chance Saloon,” where most afternoons you can find the old timers “galloping through bullet country/ Among the slow burning pints,/Ash trays, pork scratchings/And flipped beer mats”:

“A limp-along cowboy,/Once a miner,/He now counts out his future in coins from a jar,/As he takes his seat at the end of the bar./He calculates every penny, holds tight to every pound,/His meagre pension must go round and round.”