FIVE strong new books of poetry from the ever-impressive Culture Matters, demonstrating the power of speaking plainly, and the importance of naming the enemy. At a time when so many UK poets seem interested only in writing about themselves, each of these books is a reminder of poetry’s obligations to the wider world.

Our Father Eclipse (£10) by the Welsh poet Rebecca Lowe is a brilliant, inventive and original take on contemporary feelings of impending apocalypse, constructed around the image of a solar eclipse – “We dare not gaze directly / for fear of blindness, / but know instinctively / the gathering dark.”

 Wide-ranging and eloquent, these poems barely contain their rage at the way we treat our neighbours and our planet in the 21st century:
“’34 per cent of children living in poverty / 19% of people in extreme poverty / 60 per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles / wiped out by human activity since 1970, / Australia on fire, / more record temperatures on the way, / the greatest climate catastrophe / the world has ever faced…”

Black Lives Matter, Covid, global hunger, corporate greed, the refugee crisis and environmental catastrophe are all linked for Lowe by our collective inability to acknowledge our complicity in disaster:

“Let’s put on some music / let’s dance to the End of Times, a dystopian waltz, / let’s sing happy songs, think positive thoughts, / switch off your mind and live in the Now, / whilst all around us the world burns, / whilst all around us, the people die.”

Also from Wales are Alun Rees’ Ballad of the Black Domain (£10) and Mike Jenkins’ Anonymous Bosch (£10). Both try to make sense of the scale of economic, social and cultural catastrophe inflicted on the South Wales coalfield. As Rees puts it, “We were born to want and hardship, / we ate grit instead of grain, / but we were rich, yes, rich in rage, / we in the Black Domain.”

There are some fine poems in Ballad of the Black Domain, notably State of the Nation, Miners, Big Pit and the beautiful Steel Butterflies:
“We believed in the Sermon on the Mount / and the Revolution in the Valleys. We believed / in the power of the truth and the Red Flag of justice. / What foolishness was that? Foolishness is a sad disease. History / cures it with greed and brutality.”

Accompanied by photographs by Dave Lewis, Anonymous Bosch takes a bleak and black comic view of life in Merthyr and the Valleys. Jenkins is good on the everyday alienation and despair of people who have had everything taken away.

There are some great poems ridiculing the monarchy (Ol’ Phil, Ey Randy!, Tumblin’ Down), Brexit (Merthyr’s Ready) and  climate change ignorance (Summin’s Goin On). Most memorable is The End of Austeritee:
“Cop shop’s bin moved outa town, / yew ardly ever see ‘em around. // Library’s shifted to-a Leisure Centre: / all about footfall, nobuddy goes there… Omeless abandoned to-a wind an rain, / Food Banks save a family agen… But we’ll soon celebrate with glee / the glorious end of austeritee.”

Trisha Heaney’s Apricot Sun (£10) is partly about working as a teacher in Sudan, where the author had to unlearn all the racist assumptions of her childhood (“the lurid, pink, fattened flesh of empire maps pinned to classroom walls.”)

But the best poems are about growing up on a Glasgow housing scheme, like the lovely In the Scheme of Things:
“Weans, sap green, we wur unaware / o poverty an bills, peripharul estates, or social ills / tae us thi scheme wiz hame, n like / oor mammies claimed, it was dear.”

There are so many strong poems here, like Dropped (about Marcus Rashford), Pa Tells us (racism), Twas Ever Thus (homelessness), and a fabulous rallying poem for Black Lives Matter and Me Too:
“High on his perch the cockerel crows / loudly, like he’s been threatened… And the trafficked women vault from the vans and chant / And the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement chant / And Pussy Riot chant / And the Chibok women on their way home chant: / Babylon your throne gone down, gone down, Babylon your throne gone down.”
Edited by Paul Summers, and decorated by Dan Douglas’s photos of the city’s brutalist architecture, William Blake at the Bridge Hotel (£10) showcases the work of ten long-standing cultural activists on Tyneside.

Worth buying for Jane Burn’s Under the Bells and Are You Still Walking?, the snapshots of urban decay by Nev Clay, Rob Walton and Ally May, and Catherine Graham’s tender celebrations of working-class life:
“The women I grew up with had / tell it like it is voices. They favoured vowels, / vowels that flex mouths / like opera singers limbering up for an aria. / They made soup from bones and knitted / anything from booties to balaclavas… The women I knew made their feelings known / in a clash of pans. Always there / at the school gates, their headscarves / blowing like flags in the biting northeasterly wind.”

Best of the lot are by Paul Summers, notably history, seeing red and the brilliant manifesto-poem north:
“we are more than sharply contrasting photographs / of massive ships and statistics for coal, more than / crackling films were grimy faced workers are / dwarfed by shadows or omitted by chimneys, more / than foul mouthed men in smoky clubs or well-built / women in a wash-day chorus. we are more than / lessons in post-industrial sociology, more than / just case-studies of dysfunctional community… we are more than this, but not much more.”