THE US poet Fred Voss once said that he hoped his poems might one day “strike the spark or kick the pebble that will start the fire or the avalanche that will change the world a little.”

That’s a good way of describing the limitless ambitions of a slim volume of poems.

Voss is the author of one of three splendid new pamphlets from Culture Matters/Manifesto Books (£5.99 each or £15 for all three) and, like all his work, The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Our Hand is about the machine shop where he has worked for over 30 years.

No-one writes better about the insanity and the consolations of work, its importance to our lives and its invisibility in our literary culture. Best of all are the poems about his workmates, their divisions and their solidarities:

“why should we not be brothers /we all ache in the back /grunt as we lift a heavy load /sweat in front of a blast furnace flame /stare at the tin wall of a factory and wonder why our lives are hidden/from the world/why should we not be brothers /when without us there would be no world/at all?”

Ridiculing the enemy is another way to start an avalanche.

The works in Kevin Higgins’s The Minister for Poetry Has Decreed are sharp joke-poems lampooning the print and broadcast media and the politicians who benefit from them. There are good attacks here on Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Laura Kuenssberg.

The strongest are those which stop being funny half way through. In Letter to an Imaginary Friend, after the US poet Tom McGrath, Higgins compares an angry tabloid reader afraid of change to “the proprietor of an unsuccessful/bed and breakfast, who’s forever trying to get the egg /back out of the pan, /and return it to its shell.”

The third pamphlet is by the Scots poet David Betteridge. Slave Songs and Symphonies, with illustrations by Bob Starrett, addresses the ideas behind the ideas of contemporary politics. These are poems variously inspired by William Blake, Antonio Gramsci, Bertholt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Robeson, John Berger and Jimmy Reid.

The centrepiece of the book is Showing a Way, a long poem about the 1971 UCS work-in — “a bold idea changed If to That./Imagine, acted on by so many, /took on the force of hard material fact.” For all the book’s sense of overwhelming defeat, it also carries a kind of long-term revolutionary optimism:

“We are the nothings you walk past. /Your lowest and least, /we live in the margins of your power./Expendable, we fight your wars... We are your numerous and essential kin. /Suffering most, we learn most. /Our slave-songs make symphonies; /our longings, creeds./We dig your graves.”

Nobody’s Subject (BBTS, £5) is the latest pamphlet from Merthyr poet Mike Jenkins. Like Higgins, Jenkins is good on tabloid racism, Ukip and the narrow consensus of the media.

Some of these poems are like good jokes without a punchline but the best, like Proud to Be British, work really well:
“because the Queen /is a lovely old lady who harms no-one /because the Jubilee brings us altogether... because the Olympic torch /has lit up all our best tourist spots... because Tesco/stock everything with a Union Jack on... because Kate is lush; /we’ve got the best music, sheep, hospital beds/we need a Royal baby or funeral next,/to stop my flag from going limp.”

Kosuke Shirasu (1905-43) was a Japanese communist and member of the Proletarian Writers Alliance in that country.
Edited and translated by Bruce Barnes and Shirasu’s grandson Jun, Out of his Struggles (Utistugu Press, £7) is a bilingual edition of a dozen of his poems first published in long-lost magazines during the “Third Period,” when the Japanese Communist Party was illegal and trades unionists were routinely imprisoned and murdered by the authorities.

These are stark and simple poems about poverty, industrial unrest, illegality, prison, assassinations and the endless war in Manchuria.

In translation, they are a strange and unsettling combination of bitter realism, irony and a confidence in the eventual victory, as in A Message from Behind Bars:

“The kerrria japonica has blossomed. /another year gone by... from this darkness into their darkness /that gagged me, then fettered me for four years. /Is this the best sort of injustice that /they could come up with?”

We need your support to keep running. If you like what you read please donate by clicking here