THERE’S a great poem in Neil Fulwood’s new collection which addresses the difficulty of saying what sometimes needs to be said in poetry:

“I give you a poem about the state of things/You say it’s cynical and pessimistic/You ask for something positive/You ask for a nice poem/I show you a newspaper headline/You say you don’t follow current affairs/You say politics is boring/You ask for a nostalgic poem.”

Can’t Take Me Anywhere (Shoestring Press, £10) is a wonderfully gruff collection of minimalist urban landscapes — witty and scathing about work, politics, traffic, weather and the inanities of contemporary life. It’s a book of strong individual poems too, notably All Day Long, Peril, 20 Zone, Lizard and the splendidly bleak England:

“Scratch the surface and fingernails snag/on Facebook posts arm-banded with hate./Spade the earth with boot heel encouragement/and feel the bite-back of roots twisting whitely.”

The problem of “translating” the untranslatable into poetry is also at the heart of Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us (Bloodaxe, £9.95):

“There is a cyclone fence between/ourselves and the slaughter and behind it/we hover in a calm protected world like/netted fish.”

The book was first published in 1981, when Forche returned to the US from El Salvador, where she had been working as a journalist. It is back in print to coincide with the publication of her memoir of those times, What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance.

It is a book about imperialism, genocide and atrocity (“There is nothing one man will not do to another”). Nearly 40 years later, the poems still possess a shocking power, especially The Colonel, Expatriate and Return, which tells the story of Lil Milagro Ramirez, poet, guerilla leader and lover of Roque Dalton, who was tortured and murdered by the US-backed National Guard:

“who after years of confinement did not/know what year it was, how she walked/with help and was forced to shit in public./Tell them about the razor, the live wire,/dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all/who fucked her, how many times and when.”

Isabella Morra was born into an impoverished aristocratic family in 16th-century Italy. Forced to live in strict isolation in a castle in Valsinni on a steep cliff above the Ionian Sea, she devoted herself to writing a series of extraordinary poems about her longing for escape:

“I write weeping about the fierce assaults/on me by cruel Fortune and the lost days/of my youth, how in this vile, odious hamlet/I spend my life without a word of praise.”

When Morra was 26, she was murdered by her brothers in an “honour” killing. She was buried in an unmarked grave and her poetry was forgotten for several hundred years.

Isabella (Smokestack Books, £7.99) is the first complete British edition of her poetry in Italian and English and it includes a series of poems written by translator Caroline Maldonado about the life and brutal death of this remarkable young woman in the context of femminicidi and honour killings in our own time:

“Isabella is faceless. There exists no painting, no sketch./Her burial place was not marked, so I search for her features/in the landscape she made hers. Every place has a story to tell.”

Meanwhile, John Gohorry has been talking to the birds. Pipsqueak is a parakeet “fresh out of Paradise,” a popinjay, a polyglot and a polymath.

And somebody has definitely been rattling his cage. Following in the tradition of John Skelton’s 16th-century satire, Squeak, Budgie! (Smokestack Books, £7.99) offers an irreverent commentary on the follies and failures of our age — from bird-brains on Twitter and tabloids parroting lies to politicians talking cuckoo:

“Government policy, Ministers say, will always be Very Clear,/as they pilot the ship of state’s course with its amber rudder;/there’s no mutineer who will rock the boat, causing her to veer/too close to refugee camps, risking compassion flood her;/what else can Pipsqueak do in these cruel times but shudder,/warm, well-fed and safe in his silver cage, when he sees/the hollow cheeked, desperate faces of shivering refugees?”

Alternating between Rime Royal and satirical songs with Latin choruses, Pipsqueak gets his beak into Brexit, Trump, the refugee crisis, the rise of neofascism, international crises, a royal wedding, a World Cup, the Chequers agreement, Cabinet resignations, the Windrush scandal and the implosion of the Tory Party, before he receives a letter from the Home Office threatening him with deportation.

This is one sick parrot.