AFTER all those appalling, fawning poems about the monarchy (leaving some writers who should have known better looking rather foolish), it is a relief to come across Fran Lock’s Sid James at the Poetry Society:

“Cor blimey! If you’re wearing those clothes for a bet, you’ve won…Your poetry is / for rent collectors rubbing their hands at your / sorry arrears … If you’re writing that shit for a bet, / you’ve won.”

Fran Lock’s new collection Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, Ireland, €15) is her biggest and best collection yet, a series of vivid monologues and harangues by marginal voices, loners, outsiders and outcasts, surreal and subversive.

She uses the idea of “therianthropy” (the magical transformation of humans into animals) to give voice to shape-shifting, twilight, feral creatures — vampires, angels, witches and hyenas.  

Much of the book addresses bereavement and loss, and the way that grief can change us:
“on the day of your death i became a striped / hyena. hysteria’s lank technician, cursorial / man-eater, witch’s mount. i ran, filiform punk / with my mane of stale thistles, over primrose / hill, over blackheath, to gnaw the shinbones / of monuments…”

Then there are the real monsters: “the low moral wastes of England; farage’s mouth as a misconnected cistern. farage, forage, far-right rage.”

Richard Skinner’s new book Dream into Play (Poetry Salzburg, £7.50) is also about grief.
But where Lock writes about loss with a rich eloquence, Skinner leaves the important things deliberately unsaid. These are brief, painful, minimalist fragments, half-stories, without context or explanation.

The best poem in the book is the brilliant Crocodile Mother which swaps the words “Mother,” “Mum” and “tears” in a list of broken, everyday phrases:
“Mother gets in your eyes. / The tracks of my mother. The mother of a clown… Blood, sweat and mother. The tears of all battles. / Keep tears. Tears tongue. Tears of God / Holding back the mother. Burst into mother. / Super tears. Wicked steptears. / Crocodile mother...”

The poems in Irish-born poet Tara Bergin’s new collection Savage Tales (Carcanet, £15.99), are, if anything, even briefer than Skinner’s (the shortest is only four words long). It is a book of puzzles, paradoxes, oddities and fragmented observations (“I close my eyes and dream about closing my eyes.” “I wish I was the sort of person who didn’t wish they were a different person”). Raymond Carver meets Chekhov.  

Because they have no context, many of these tiny stories feel sinister and unsettling – “We get a lot of writers in here, said the rollercoaster operator lowering the bar;” “Savagery in the fields again: the white flesh of the hawthorns torn and exposed; limbs strewn at their feet...”

Mark A Murphy’s The Ruin of Eleanor Marx (Moloko, Germany, €15) is a kind of fragmented poetic biography of Marx’s youngest surviving daughter, combining politics and people, fact and conjecture.

Part of the book evokes scenes from the Marx family life in London’s “deadly smog” — the siblings who died in infancy, Eleanor’s half-brother Freddie, “Mohr” and “Tussy” playing games:
“The people’s prophet and one-time poet, / plaits bindweed into Tussy’s hair. No happier / memory for the rebellion’s purest daughter. / The noon sun riding high over Hampstead.”

Aveling, of course, is the villain of the book (“Every movement has an Edward Aveling”). But the sequence also features Engels, Shaw, the Lafargues. And there is a great portrait of Eleanor, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg relaxing at the Fourth Congress of the Second International:
“After a remarkable day expelling anarchists / Refuting gradualists / Reaffirming their Marxism / Every good orator deserves / a Wild Woodbine / washed down with a quart / of Hall’s Tonic Wine / And, in due course, an abundance of time / to smell the roses.”

It is a wide-ranging and suggestive portrait of a remarkable woman and the intellectual, political and emotional forces that eventually destroyed her:
“Hardly surprising, daughter, collaborator, / translator, biographer, / and alter-ego to the most talked about // philosopher of the millennium, a paradox / in-waiting, should carry / the weight of Victorian hang-ups … on her anorexic shoulders.”