“IN THE dark times will there be singing?” Bertolt Brecht famously asked when he was in exile. His answer was that “there will be singing about the dark times.” Here are four strong new collections about the dark times in which we now find ourselves.

Mike Jenkins (ed) Gwrthryfel/Uprising (Culture Matters, £12) is a fantastic collection of radical poetry from contemporary Wales. There are almost 80 poems here, in English and Welsh, including some great poems by Sheenagh Pugh, Des Mannay, Alun Rees, Christopher Meredith, Tracey Rhys, Annest Gwilym (Wales for Sale) and Anne Phillips (We are a proud nation of call centres).

It is a collection of poems about violence – against the poor, against women, against language, against common decency, against Nature. In Gelliwastad Ablaze Dyfan Lewis watches the summer-dry gorse burn one night above Swansea:

“everything was ablaze... you raised your hands towards the sky / and howled and I did the same and howled / at the mountain to stop, but it wouldn’t listen... what else could we have done except howl?”

This is from Karen Ankers In Other News:

“In other news, / another storm hit another city, but / it wasn’t yours, and another degree / in the earth’s temperature is only a degree. After all, / you still have your shiny shoes and pristine clothes and takeaways and / the mirrored screen of your brand-new phone means / you don’t even need to strain your neck looking / the other way.”

And this from Dave Rendle’s Austerity Bites:

“time for them to hear us shout / beyond their false mirrors / no use complaining / in the darkness we must sow light / as they treat us with derision / time to drive these bastards out.”

Still Life (Speculative Books, £25) is a beautiful book of photographs by Angela Catlin and poems by Henry Bell, documenting life in Glasgow during the pandemic:

“In the gutter the gulls have swapped spilt chips / for famished rats... No night bus is crawling / or creeping home; its snail trail of vomit has vanished, reflecting no stars. Wheesht, the whole city’s sleeping now...”

As well as remembering the sudden silence of the city under lockdown, the book is a celebration of the way collective life defiantly continued behind closed doors, masks and social distancing, despite the appalling double standards of the Tory government.

When, on Eid 2021 Immigration Enforcement officers attempted to detain two Indian-born residents living in Pollokshields, hundreds of local people blocked the road to stop them:

“moving the cops back / a great mass of fellow feeling / pulling open a cage / freeing those neighbours... together in solidarity / experiencing a liberation / that cannot be taken away / ¡el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido! /echoing through the great gen o the warld the day.”

It’s a book about what was lost during the pandemic. But it is also a book about what we found:

“The price of shares in Zoom is falling. / A wood pigeon / flies across the blue sky, / its fat breast a silhouette / amongst tenement chimneys. / Shares are up for Rolls Royce / and the people of Chile are still on the streets. The Chileans are asking again / why would we want to return to normal.”

Linda France, The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack Books, £7.99) is partly a verse biography of Susan Davidson (1796–1877), who spent 30 years landscaping and developing the grounds of Allen Banks in Northumberland. But it is also an argument about history and nature at a time of global fragmentation and ecological crisis:

“Our plot of earth is a borrowed book / begun in sunshine, finished in hail.”

Every day for the past five years Paul Summers has walked along the rocky shore at the mouth of the Tyne. His latest collection billy casper’s tears (Smokestack Books, £7.99) is a book about darkness, in which rage and despair about the contemporary world can heard above the hysterical gossip of the insatiable gulls:

“& on the eighth day / there was darkness... darker than that time / you gaffer taped my eyes... darker / than the entire contents / of johnny cash’s wardrobe... it’s dark / as fuck. much darker than the last time, / not a patch on the next.”