THE UNEXCITING news that Andrew Motion has won the Ted Hughes prize and James Fenton the PEN Pinter prize and that Simon Armitage has been elected Oxford Professor of Poetry has done little to dispel the impression that the contemporary poetry scene is a small and closed world of mutual self-congratulation.

It’s not that these poets are without merit or distinction. But it all looks a bit predictable, not to say dull.

Meanwhile, a long way from the arts-coverage-by-press-release world of the broadsheets and the BBC, it is left to energetic — and usually unpaid — editors working at independent, provincial presses to keep the doors open for different kinds of voices and experiences.

Four new collections from small presses based in Devon, Preston, Brighton and north Wales are shining examples.

It’s unlikely that Red Poets editor Mike Jenkins will ever be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry. But he has published almost 20 collections of radical poetry since the early 1980s, including A Dissident Voice and Barkin!

Like its predecessors, his new book Shedding Paper Skin (Carreg Gwalch, £7.50) is variously grim, lively, sardonic, tender and angry, full of affection for a people and a place and heavy with dismay at the way the “ideals I cherish are mocked/as fantasies and everyone seems out/for grabs or whatever can be bought.”

There are some effective landscapes here, like Journey of the Taf and poems from other Welsh writers, notably WH Davies, Peter Finch, RS Thomas, Nigel Jenkins, Alun Hughes and Idris Davies (“most work’s in the city/far from your struggling town/where shops are wearing shutters/and the postman wears a frown”).

In Merthyr Film Sets, Jenkins imagines Merthyr as an apocalyptic planet called Devastation, inhabited by zombies and the undead, heroin-addicts and the unemployed, where the politicians are “like aliens” and everything is filmed: “the cameras above streets/recording, unedited, as rats and pigeons/scavenge on piles of droppings/of the last people to leave/before the roller-blinds come down/and everything’s sucked into a black hole...”

John O’Donoghue is also concerned with economic crisis in Fools & Mad (Waterloo Press, £10). A verse-novel in iambic tetrameter rhyming couplets, it imagines the ghosts of 12 Irish poets — including Jonathan Swift, WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan — interrogating a somewhat moth-eaten Celtic tiger at the Court of Poetry (“what all of ruined Ireland wants to know:/How could this creature bring us so much woe?”)

It’s a risk, trying to write in the voices of Ireland’s most famous poets. But it is an entertaining conceit, as each poet brings to the proceedings their own limited world view:

“Some say the interest/On avarice is just and Ireland deserves/To pay the price” (Swift), “By the turn/Of the gyre the truly wise can discern/That the tortured orbit of the mad moon/shows that things fall apart...” (Yeats), “the country lacked bold Fenian men” (Behan) and “minister, chapel and monastery,/Bishopric, cathedral, and seminary:/These are all to blame for Ireland’s demise” (Joyce).

Under the Devil’s Moon (Penniless Press, £5.99) is the debut volume from the Morning Star’s arts critic Susan Darlington.

It’s a lovely collection of fairy-tales, playground cruelties, bad-dreams, day-dreams and delicate similes (“The cat makes Braille in the freshly fallen snow”).

A gentle English surrealist, Darlington writes about urban changelings, domesticated shapeshifters and the witchcraft of everyday life (“The carpenter made her out of a rowan,” “The snail shell was empty/and so I slipped inside,” “I pluck out your eyes while you sleep,” “He lay at the bottom of the ocean,” “When we were wolves...”)

Definitely recommended, especially for the poems Queen Bee, Magpie, The Wren and Moths.

The strongest of these four books is another first collection, The Devil’s Tattoo (Indigo Dreams, £6) by Brett Evans. Editor of Prole magazine, Evans is a sort of north Wales Charles Bukowski, good at quick, bleak, grubby story-poems like Portrait of the Piss-artist as a Young Boy, Stepping out for a Cigarette, Scarecrow, the beautiful Triolet to a Barmaid and Reading Sean O’Brien in the Bath, based on O’Brien’s own Reading Stevens in the Bath.

In Notes from Colwyn Bay, Evans records the music of the town:
“the redundant armoured shutters/of empty shops... the unoiled Job Centre’s door,/the taxi-rank’s white noise,/and Danny-bloody-Boy come midnight.
This is north Wales noir, or small-town life viewed as a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western:
“There’s nothing but waiting around to die, so you choose/how to spend that time: swatting flies on your stubbled/throat whilst waiting for a train or riding through/this one-horse world, hell-bent on creed or trouble...An extra in another’s movie, too late you’ve grasped/that at the bar, in bed, on the street, dying’s just dying./Your final suspicion, that there must have been much more/that there must have been music, an unforgettable score.”

By Andy Croft