FREEDOM Poems for Ocalan (Peace in Kurdistan, £4) is an international book of poems written for the 70th birthday of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned in Turkey since his abduction in 1999.

Among the British poets are James Kelman, Maxine Peake, Greta Sykes and Doug Nicholls and, in the words of one contributor: “If we took up the struggle, more or less,/only on the infallibly favourable chance of success,/ History would be very easy to make.”

It’s worth buying alone for the poem by Gaelic poet Aonghas MacNeacail, in which he writes: “though you are surrounded/by a solid stone rampart,/and though you see no blue sky… your cause is a fertile forest/where your story is a narrative/among branches, twigs and buds… as you rise like the dove of freedom.”