FREEDOM Poems for Ocalan (Peace in Kurdistan, £4) is an international book of poems written for the 70th birthday of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned in Turkey since his abduction in 1999.

Among the British poets are James Kelman, Maxine Peake, Greta Sykes and Doug Nicholls and, in the words of one contributor: “If we took up the struggle, more or less,/only on the infallibly favourable chance of success,/ History would be very easy to make.”

It’s worth buying alone for the poem by Gaelic poet Aonghas MacNeacail, in which he writes: “though you are surrounded/by a solid stone rampart,/and though you see no blue sky… your cause is a fertile forest/where your story is a narrative/among branches, twigs and buds… as you rise like the dove of freedom.”

The title poem of Michael Rosen’s new collection for grown-ups, Mr Mensh (Smokestack Books, £8.95), offers a view of the world based on some of the extravagant names his parents called him when he was a child.

There is Mr Klutz (a fool), Mr Bubkes (who talks rubbish) and Mr Mommsers (you don’t want to meet him.) Then there’s Mr Kvetsh (who complains about the soup), Mr Shmalts (who dribbles soup down his shirt), Mr Shnorrer (who wants your soup), Mr Ganuf (who nicks your soup) and Mr Gantse Macher (who owns the soup factory).

It is a clever way of talking about some of the ridiculous monsters who think that the world is a bowl of soup just for them and the book contains some splendid attacks on Trump, Blair, Cameron, Johnson — Minister for Telling Everyone That Things Are OK Really — and all those privately educated Cabinet ministers who have done so much harm to the state education system: “First they said they needed data/about the children/to find out what they’re learning./ Then they said they needed data/about the children/to make sure they are learning./ Then the children only learnt/what could be turned into data./Then the children became data.”

Mr Mensh is a book about the absurdities of everyday life soup — raspberry pips, toe-nails, warts and all. But it’s also a book about the violent absurdities of everyday politics in the 21st  century — the so-called end of austerity, anti-semitism, racism, fascism and war: “It wasn’t immigrants who crashed the banks/It wasn’t immigrants who said we had to tighten our belts/It wasn’t immigrants who cut a million jobs from the public sector/It wasn’t immigrants who slapped on the wage cap/It wasn’t immigrants who stoked up the housing market/It wasn’t immigrants who stopped building council houses/It wasn’t immigrants who cut the budgets for schools and the NHS/It wasn’t immigrants who hide billions in tax havens/It wasn’t immigrants who spend billions on bombs.”

US poet Fred Voss has a lot to say about the scapegoating of immigrants in his new collection Robots Have No Bones (Culture Matters, £10).

Voss has worked as a machinist for over 40 years and he writes brilliantly about the satisfactions and the miseries of work, along with the heroism of the class that makes the world go round: “I write this poem/because someone has to tell the story of these men who never stop getting up/from their stool to go to their machine as they grow old making this world/out of steel and aluminium… as the heat rises and the foremen scream and the machines pound and grind/that bell that rings in their hearts.”

At the same time he is aware that many of the machinists in his factory like Trump: “they are good men/with a tool steel square or a finely calibrated micrometer gripped/in their hands/or a newly-born granddaughter held/against their heartbeats/but they have been fooled by a con artist.”

At the heart of the book is a series of poems about the relationship between a machinist and his machine  — “a machinist may show his machine/tears on his face no human being has ever seen” — and on the ever-present fear of automation: “what will we have left/after the computers have taken over/and we pace in circles flexing/our useless hands?”

Best of all is the poem Ready to Go to Work, in which a machinist wonders “why can’t/all the children starving in the world be fed/all the homeless/standing on street corners housed all the oceans cleaned all the lights turned on… and wishes someone would give him the blueprint/so he could make/a better world.”