NOW that the exciting race for this year’s poetry awards has begun with the shock news that the winner of the TS Eliot Prize teaches at Oxford, here are three strong new collections from Culture Matters that are not in danger of winning any prizes.

In his latest book From Aberfan t Grenfell (£9) Merthyr poet Mike Jenkins writes about poverty, unemployment and homelessness, combining bleak comedy, righteous indignation and painful wisdom in poems like Merthyr is Vietnam, Got a Season and Carn catch-a Criminals: 

“Got CCTV even on-a trains / securitee in-a shoppin arcades, / but ’ey still carn get them criminals… Got rip-off celebs an royals / shiftin fortewns like magic tricks, / ’ey still carn get the criminals… Got landlords like-a bloody mafia, bosses cruel as Great War generals, / but ’ey still carn catch-a criminals.”

The book is worth buying alone for the title poem, spoken by a refugee from south Wales living in London: 

“I come yer / all-a way from ower valley / escaping to the city, / fire-fightin in-a famlee. I come yer / an woz like my ol man / tellin me stories of Aberfan… the pooer under a tip / the pooer trapped in a Tower / justice be’ind barriers o paper.”

In The Trouble with Monsters: Poems for Dark Times (£8), Christopher Norris also includes a poem about the Grenfell Tower fire, cleverly juxtaposing Joyce Grenfell and George Osborne:

“George, don’t do that: don’t give us all that spiel / About austerity, the debt, how we’re / All in this thing together, or how we’ll / Just have to pull our belts in and adhere / To your fine plan for cutting a great deal / with your old banker pals…”

It’s a hugely enjoyable collection of traditional stanzas and witty, comic rhymes. The contrast between the elegance of Norris’s formal technique and his political anger sustains long, argumentative poems like Migrants, Brecht Offers Advice to Waverers, Daughters of the Vicarage, Dark Times Revisited, Letter to WH Auden, To the Wife of an All-too Interventionist Cabinet Minister (after Edgell Rickword’s satire on the Spanish civil war) and Dark Times Revisited:

“You singers, don’t forget how Brecht replied / When asked ‘In these dark times, just what / Have we to sing about?’ and he replied / ‘About the dark times, you sad lot!’”

Jane Burn, in One of These Dead Places (£8), writes about growing up in dark times “too clueless to know that I could have been anything” in South Yorkshire during the 1970s and 1980s:

“leaving school still not being sure what a noun is / trying to fill the gaps left by a crap education / hand-me-downs from them up the street… knowing absolutely nothing about wine… the raw song of the siren’s end of shift… the fear that I might end up in the sewing factory… knowing there is nothing more ahead than there is behind.”

It is a powerful, moving and defiant collection, full of strong and compelling poems like I Wish I Had Married a Prince, Knobs Like You and Thieving Bastard, about a lynch-mob enraged by a suspected “foreigner” stealing in a supermarket:

“I am afraid. This is not someone / pocketing Mars Bars, / this is the start of looting, smash and grabbing — / this is the start of ram-raid, take what the hell you want / Since We Got Our Country Back.”

And this is for all those prize-winning poets who accept the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire:

“Britons / never, never, never shall be slaves — only take slaves, / sell slaves, kill slaves… Tie a medal / to a pretty ribbon — wear a fancy hat, receive your pat / on the head from the Queen, smile for the camera, forget what these honours really mean…”

All titles available from culturematters.org.uk.