FOR anyone unexcited by the news that the Forward prize for the best first collection has just been given to a book of poems about playing Super Mario, four important new books of poetry about things that matter might stir the spirits.

As Rob Walton puts it in the collection Release a Rage of Red (Culture Matters, £5): “Write poems on the tins you put in the foodbank/Write verse about how foodbank even became a word/Write about alternatives to foodbanks… Write about writing a Closed sign on the last foodbank.”

The collection is the third anthology of entries to the annual Unite-sponsored Bread and Roses award. Edited by Mike Quille, the book is a furious reply to the insular and trivial narcissism of so much of the contemporary British poetry scene.

It contains some fantastic poems by Sarah Wimbush, Owen Gallagher, Laura Taylor, Alan Morrison, Ian Parks, Lisa Kelly, Paul Summers, Jane Burn and Martin Hayes. It’s worth buying just for Ruth Aylett’s villanelle Orgreave:

“This was their lesson, a baton on the head/and the horses charging across the field/but we became more resolute instead… Now millions need foodbanks to get fed/so let’s fight back against the power they wield./That was their lesson, a baton on the head,/but we became more resolute instead.”

Or Angela Topping’s The Bastards:

“They tried to stop me by saying people like me couldn’t/They tried to stop me by letting me then stopping me… They tried to stop me by making me watch Disney films until I was sick… They tried to stop me by going la la la when I talked… They tried to stop me by dropping me down the agenda but only half way down so I would know my place/They tried to stop me by binding me with silver, driving a stake through my heart.”

Fran Lock’s Raptures and Captures (Culture Matters, £8) is a book about saints, an extraordinary and original collection of spoof hagiographies and genuine martyrdoms, beautifully illustrated by Steev Burgess’s lavish punk collages.

Following the Russian Orthodox Saint Silouan’s instruction to “Keep your mind in Hell and despair not”  — which Lock compares to Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” —  she reclaims some famous saints for the hellish 21st century.

Saint Sebastian is rebooted as the patron saint of Soho rent-boys, Lucy as the patron saint of anti-consumerism, Agnes as the patron saint of victims of femicide, Homobonus as the patron saint of child labour, Martin of Tours as the patron saint of the homeless and Francis becomes the patron saint of environmental protest against the “grim cities and the misweaved mess of money.”

It’s a rich, dense and raging book, which concludes with a fantastic malediction for Donald Trump: “conspicuous enfant, in the tantrum of his tyranny… humunculoid fuck-spawn… grim umbilicus of bunting… fascist emergency… shit straining to shit.”

Jay Bernard’s Surge (Chatto, £10) is a brilliant and unbearably moving account of the 1981 New Cross fire in London, when 13 young black people were killed and 27 injured: “Me seh black smoke ah billow at di house in New Cross/Me seh blood ah goh run for di pain of di loss.”

Bernard draws on the testimony of some of the survivors to create a kind of crowd-poem of different voices, connecting the New Cross fire to the Grenfell Tower and all the victims of racism and racist violence in London:

“all of their ghosts are burning/above the city. Some fires burn/pink as damaged blossom… And then the wind breathes sideways:/their soot is scattered, ghosts of the now-gone/dragged out of hereafter back to tonight,/back to the cold air making its way towards/a darker past, the true past, there at spirit level.”

There is another powerful poem about the Grenfell fire in Chris Nash’s Songs of the Silk Roads (self-published, [email protected]): “As boughs grow log, walls go unreplaced/The screens wither, we chatter face to face; From root to shoot ready to fruit, re-wild/Now this city-world, polluted and defiled.”

Although self-published, these poems are crying out for a publisher to do justice to their gentle power and wisdom. Nash has worked for over 30  years as a teacher in London and in Beijing, and traces the “silk roads” that connect the multicultural world in which we all live, it’s appalling divisions and its potential unities: “Nightly, let’s swallow the sun’s light/To reignite reefs of crystal; radiant/nights luminescing into our dreams/Of star-silver fish, seas of socialism.”