“WHY can’t life still be hilarious?” asks Greg Freeman in Marples Must Go! (Vole, £10). Looking back on a 1960s childhood — the Dandy and the Beano, school milk monitors, Space Patrol, The Flowerpot Men, Juke Box Jury — Freeman cannot help but make gloomy comparisons with the present.

These days the Bash Street School is an academy, Desperate Dan has diabetes, Plug has lost both legs in Afghanistan and Walter the Softy has won the Forward prize for poetry.

The book takes its title from a slogan painted on the M1 about the Tory transport minister in the 1960s who opened the first motorways and closed 4,000 miles of railway lines:  “And go he did,/after getting his peerage, flitting/on the night ferry to Monaco/to escape a huge tax bill. He’s history,/just another perverse politician/putting his foot down on our road to ruin.”

Emma Jones’s first collection The Incident (Smokestack, £7.99) also engages with history. The title poem tells the story of an unremarkable day in August 1944, when nothing much happened: the weather was beautiful, a dog barked and the women of Amsterdam went on making jam. Think about it.

Her book is  about solidarity and resistance, written with tenderness and fury and a passionate commitment to a world still possible. At the heart of the book is a series of portraits of remarkable women who tried to resist, like Rosa Parks, Sophie Scholl and Jo Cox.

It’s a study in what we fail to see and what we need to remember, about history and fascism, what our times make of us and the violence we allow to be done to others — minorities, refugees, dissidents, asylum-seekers, benefit claimants:
“of course… we’d have stood with the Levellers in Burford/linked arms with the martyrs at Peterloo/Amritsar/Sharpeville/and Derry/we’d have been the only Chartists/in the village… [but] times have changed/these days/you’ll find us holding the middle ground/the status quo/now/is basically sound...”

Ruth Valentine’s new book If You Want Thunder (Smokestack, £7.99) encompasses the tragedies of the public world — civil wars in Syria and Sudan, knife crime in North London, the Iraq-Iran war —and our private griefs.

At the heart of the collection is an extraordinary alphabetical sequence about the Grenfell Tower dead and the society that allowed them to die. This is her take on the Tories’ hostile environment campaign:
“The tigers wait outside the villages./The crocodiles wait below the water-lilies./I’ve waited twenty years for permission to live here./The informers wait in shaded alleyways.
The soldiers wait tetchily at the border./I am waiting for my landlord to evict me...
“The traffickers wait for someone to pay a ransom./The fisherman waits for his boat to come back empty./I am waiting for the bank to withhold my money./The children wait for a lorry to hide and die in./I am waiting for you to decide to send me back.”

As always, Valentine writes wisely and well about the morality of politics and the mortality of us all, about remembrance and forgetting and “busy humanity with its suitcases and phones, its sudden weeping...”

Whatsname Street (Smokestack, £7.99) is Anna Robinson’s third collection. It’s a study of working-class life in London SE1 — south of the river behind the South Bank, beyond Waterloo station, below the radar. Blake’s Lambeth.

It’s a kind of people’s history of one particular housing estate as told by its tenants, combining oral history, archive records and layered memory — weddings and wash days, street parties and trips to the seaside and, above all, the changing and changeless demands of work, poverty and inequality, the patience of the poor and the impatience of history:

“History is and was and so is that patch/of pavement where one tiny leaf shape/is never wet no matter how much rain./It’s in the shards of clay pipes on the banks/of the Thames and the salt-glaze fragments./It’s in the loose change in my pocket/and the fact that there is never any/loose change in my pocket.”

Selina Rodrigues’s much-anticipated first collection Ferocious (Smokestack, £7.99) takes a long look at the invisible ecology of contemporary urban living and working and the competing structures of time,  money and labour. It’s a book about online desires, migratory workers and childcare, computer screens, night-shift cleaners and call-centres:

“This will never be my real job. Sending orders to Paris, splicing/calls in Mumbai. It just works for now. This is my 5th country,/all legit, I’ve got papers. No coughs, no swallows, it’s my voice/they want. I don’t hear it crack, but sometimes the line breaks./I’m thinking power-– Bangkok or maybe Frankfurt next./When I can fly again. Sure sometimes my thoughts split, I lose/a call. 24 hours –a city’s always your friend, right?’

Antony Owen’s Cov Kids (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, £8) is a hymn to his native Coventry, the “ghost town” of the 1980s, with its Two-Tone, Ska, Ben Sherman shirts and Cyrille Regis.

There is a lovely poem about the men and women who worked at the Jaguar plant making luxury cars they could never afford themselves: “who drank ale and cocoa,/who lived as close as Browns Lane and dreamt a basic dream./On Sundays they petrol-mowed their tiger-striped lawns, then/drove to church in bashed up suits and rusty, wheezing cars.”

And this is from Calling Out Racism Coventry Style: “To remove spit off a windscreen you need white vinegar... To remove excrement from a letterbox you need a screwdriver...To remove a human being from the area: repeat hate over... To remove a racist from the whole country, call them out.”

Best of all is If Boris Johnson Had a Cuppa with My Nan from Willenhall,  in which Owen imagines his nan’s reply to the Prime Minister:

“You come in my fuckin house with limp dick daffs sit on my dead man’s chair,/quip racist jokes, turn your nose up at my broken biscuits, you flopsy fucker… Those daffs are your policies; those broken biscuits are Brexit... that tea was from Amritsar,/and it will stain your teeth like bullets...”