AMIR DARWISH is a British-Syrian poet of Kurdish origin who came to this country as an asylum-seeker during the second Gulf war, hanging underneath a lorry on a cross-channel ferry.

In his second full-length collection Dear Refugee, Darwish seeks to rescue refugees from the media images of perpetrators or victims and he reflects on the suffering of the world’s 22 million refugees, what they have left behind, what they have lost and where they have arrived:

“Be thankful to the roads, Their stones as they lie before you/To the sky that generously shows you/The moon dangling its legs in your eyes,/Say thank you to nature, to the rivers who feed/The earth to feed you,/Be thankful to life and earth/When they knock open your heart.”

Thirty years ago this month, during the opening minutes of the FA Cup semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool at Hillsborough, 96 men, women and children died in the
worst tragedy in British sporting history.

For almost three decades, the survivors and the families of the dead have had to campaign against the police, government and media who blamed the fans for the tragedy.

David Cain’s Truth Street combines the eye-witness testimonies of the survivors at the second inquest to create an epic-poem that, part oral history and part documentary theatre, is ­chilling and painfully human:

“It was just an eerie sound./It probably only lasted a second or two./But it felt like a lot longer./It’s hard to describe the sound./I’ve never heard the sound since...”

In Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood Palestinian writer Reja-e Busailah looks back in his 90th year on growing up in a small Palestinian town in the 1930s and 1940s.

Although blind since infancy, Busailah recalls in rich detail a happy childhood that ended in 1948 when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Israelis and the author was forced to join the Death March from Lydda:

“The hangmen issued from Gallows Land,/they roamed far and wide/bearing their gallows on their backs/setting them up in every land.”

Ross Wilson’s first full collection Line Drawing explores the fault lines between people and the lines that connect us. Drawing on his experiences as a Scottish schoolboy boxing champion, Wilson looks at the place of violence in history:

“Who knows what Cain was thinking,/cuffed in a van. Or Abel, buried/with the cause of all the trouble/under a rubble of chairs and glass./Or the war-painted banshee... the heart
of the Bruce in his fist like a bomb/to throw in some Holy War/in the name of God or some such thing our/thinking inspires us to fight over.”

This Noise is Free is a book about buskers and busking by Edinburgh-based alt-folk singer-songwriter Andy Green.

A front-row seat to the universe, it's located somewhere between the rainbow, the gutter, and the charity shops licking their lips. Inspired by Walt Whitman, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and Elizabeth Cotten, Green explores the hidden histories, characters, music and unexpected camaraderie of life on the streets from Matlock to Memphis:

“The street is a bottle of white lightning/asking me for a hug/the street is a one-toothed woman/sharing my flapjack ... the street is a beautiful red-haired woman/who’s been out all night dancing ... the street comes over and hugs me like a jukebox/it just got out of prison today.”

All titles published by, and available from, Smokestack Books: smokestack-books.co.uk