EXACTLY a hundred years ago, Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months in prison for publishing articles in the Workers’ Dreadnought urging London dockers not to load ships with arms to be used against the infant Soviet Union.

At her trial she declared: “Capitalism is a wrong system of society and it has got to be smashed — I would give my life to smash it.”

In Holloway prison she began writing a series of poems about the working-class women she met there. Because the authorities refused to allow her pen and paper, she had to use chalk to write what she called her “faithful lines upon inconsistent slate.”

The result was Writ on Cold Slate (Smokestack Books, £7.99), now published in a new edition with photographs by Pankhurst’s friend and fellow-Suffragette Norah Smyth.

It is a classic account of life in a women’s prison —  the young and the old, the homeless and the hungry, prostitutes, mothers, pregnant women and babies born in captivity — and it’s a passionate plea for justice on behalf of what Pankhurst called the “dregs from the ancient system’s wheel of waste.”

The elaborate and ornate language of these poems may sometimes feel dated and it must have seemed old-fashioned even 100 years ago. But the social and political urgency of her arguments are both modern and timeless.

One of the most remarkable poems in the book is the long For Half a Year, in which Pankhurst turns on the magistrate who has sentenced her, as representing “the very hub and central spring/of that I fight, that hoary power of wealth/His soul sits in a cellar hoarding gold;/o’er mighty realms his power extending rules...

“His paper tokens pass the world around,/compel in Africa the Negro’s toil… For him, in Britain too, the miner delves;/weavers and spinners follow ceaseless toil,/their wage by far competitors depressed,/children and parents in those Eastern mills,/worse fed than beasts and nothing better housed.

“Here, in Wealth’s citadel, old wretched dens,/for him each week provide most monstrous dues,/a blighting charge upon their tenant hordes./For him are children stunted, infants die;/poor mother drudges leave their wailing babes... Upon his call to war, go millions forth/prepared to die if he will give them bread.”

In Attempts on Death (Smokestack Books, £8.99) Iraqi poet and diplomat Chawki Abdelamir seeks to understand the historic destruction of his country — caught between a violent dictatorship and an illegal invasion — and the breaking up of its millennia-old past into fragments: “man burnt alive whose body remains/man assassinated having lost his corpse/man asleep, his dream on the screens/man facing the tanks entering Basra/man standing/Iraq.”

It’s a book about oil and sand, soldiers and civilians, heroes and martyrs, the innocent and the dead in a land where the world’s news-cameras are happy to “stuff themselves with dust and human flesh.”

Translated by Alan Dent, the poems draw on Sumerian mythology, Islamic history, Arab poetry and the everyday horror of 21st-century imperial warfare:

“Of the massacre/all that remains are shoes/a pile of tanned skin.. Death prefers/naked feet and bodies/the worst fabric/resists it more than skin and bone.”

Martin Hayes’s new collection Where We Get Magic From (Culture Matters, £10) is a kind of children’s book. Illustrated by Adrian Malaiet, the poems offer wonderfully inventive and comic explanations about the origins of things such as pirates, board-games, the tiger’s roar, rockets, and tears:

“they say/humans are the only animals that cry/but if you believe that/then this poem won’t mean anything to you... even polar bears cry sometimes/but that’s only been recently/ever since us humans/started destroying their icy homes… so what I am saying is/that all of the animals/do indeed cry/but that it’s only us humans/who need tears/to prove it.”

It’s a clever book, combining simple language, small thoughts and big ideas, as in Hayes’s explanation for the reason most people prefer dogs to bullets:

“on their own/bullets are just pieces of metal/like a fork is/like a spoon is/like a candelabra is/like a wedding ring is... that’s the thing about bullets/on their own/they are utterly useless/but put them in a pair of human hands/BOOM!/something will go wrong/really really soon/and that’s why I prefer dogs.”