FIVE strong new books of poetry from the ever-impressive Culture Matters, demonstrating the power of speaking plainly, and the importance of naming the enemy. At a time when so many UK poets seem interested only in writing about themselves, each of these books is a reminder of poetry’s obligations to the wider world.

Our Father Eclipse (£10) by the Welsh poet Rebecca Lowe is a brilliant, inventive and original take on contemporary feelings of impending apocalypse, constructed around the image of a solar eclipse – “We dare not gaze directly / for fear of blindness, / but know instinctively / the gathering dark.”

 Wide-ranging and eloquent, these poems barely contain their rage at the way we treat our neighbours and our planet in the 21st century:
“’34 per cent of children living in poverty / 19% of people in extreme poverty / 60 per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles / wiped out by human activity since 1970, / Australia on fire, / more record temperatures on the way, / the greatest climate catastrophe / the world has ever faced…”