THE BLOCKADE SWALLOW (Smokestack Books, £8.99) is a selection of poems by the Soviet writer Olga Berggolts (1910-75), whose daily broadcasts on Leningrad radio during the Nazi blockade of the city became a symbol of the city’s refusal to surrender:

“The hungry, cruel, and dark winter / forty-one to forty-two will never be forgotten, / nor the fierce artillery fire, / nor the horrors of the bombing in forty-three. / The ground beneath the city lies pierced and broken. / Not a single life, comrades, will be forgotten.”

The book covers the years from 1925-60, bearing eloquent witness to some of the most tragic events of the 20th century — from the NEP years and the Terror (when Berggolts was imprisoned for two years), through war and blockade, to the disappointment of the post-war years:

“He’s already set to tarnish our glory, / he’s already set to slander all the dead, / that desk lamp hero / signing documents… / but in our asphalt seeps / a bloody trace / that we can never sit down to erase.”

There are 35 million child refugees in the world today; over a million were born in flight, in exile, in camps.

In Nadir (Smokestack Books, £8.99) the Italian writer Laura Fusco attempts to record the stories of refugees fleeing persecution, displacement, hunger and war, especially the women and the children:

“They aren’t immigrants / They aren’t refugees / They aren’t clandestine / They are children.”

It is a painful and unforgettable portrait of the wretched of the earth who continue to resist despite everything, a book about and desperate marches, fences, camps, detention centres, squats and underpasses. desert caravans and dangerous sea-crossings:

“At home / it was a journey to go and fetch the water / but this time it was the water that came / onto the deck of the boat and carried her away…”

Alison Brackenbury’s latest collection Thorpeness (Carcanet, £12.99), is about the natural world, specifically the English countryside.

She writes as well about her ancestors — agricultural labourers and domestic servants — as she does about the woods and birds of her childhood.

And always with an elegiac sense of what we have lost in our lifetimes. As she writes in The Oldest Tree in Mercombe Wood:

“You are the year. We are the hour. / Green in my death, I fear for you.”

There is a fine memorial here for the poet Jenny Joseph, and two lovely poems about Edward and Helen Thomas. Best of all is a beautiful piece remembering the 1968 Apollo flight and her childhood excitement of seeing the Earth as our common home:

“They floated past the moon without a spark / of radio, the quiet before birth. / Pulsed by its cobalt seas, they watched the Earth / its perfect O, rise trustful from the dark… The blue sea rose, then drowned. We lost the lark. / I never dreamed that we would reach such dark.”

Susan Darlington is also good at writing about the natural world, the stories it contains, the secrets that it reveals.

Traumatropic Heart (Selcouth Station, £5) is a book about birds, trees, foxes, death and life:

“In the winter storm / two boughs crashed down / a pair of antlers / that were abandoned / by the wind’s / trophy hunters.”

For her, the natural world is a place of shapeshifting fertility and loss. In the beautiful title poem the human heart is a fallen tree providing shelter for birds:

“they fly — resolute — / into the heavy chambers / of my traumatropic heart… and when spring returns / the birds take wing / and leave me / stronger.”

Pnina Shinebourne’s Unbridled Messiah (Leaf by Leaf, £9.99) tells the extraordinary story of the 17th-century Jewish mystic, Shabtai Zvi of Smyrna, who declared himself to be the Messiah.

Imprisoned by the Ottoman authorities, he later converted to Islam to escape execution.

It is a fascinating story of delusion and belief, followers and doubters, miracles and disappointments, an entertaining mix of comedy and seriousness.

The story is narrated by two irreverent “heavenly sisters” who quote Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Kafka and Beckett as they argue about the meaning of the “messiah-craze”:

“Baffling innit… how people can be so gullible / a bit of empathy wouldn’t go amiss / you mean show some concern / yes, imagine the pogroms, the pain of exile, the yearning for deliverance / … I thought utopia was dead / well she hibernates for years and years, then bursts out with a fury, flaps, spins, then hides again…”

The last word is given to Shabtai’s wife, Sarah:

“It’s up to us women to get together… redeem ourselves from oppression and injustice, / and yes, every righteous woman can become / the saviour of her people.”