THERE is a curious fable in Aesop about a donkey eating thistles, variously interpreted as an emblem of poverty, avarice, demagoguery or diversity.

In Eating Thistles (Smokestack, £7.99) the US-Scottish writer Deborah Moffatt takes the donkey for an image of the way that poetry must always chew on the unpalatable and indigestible:

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She writes in a spiky language “sharp and barbed as the wire on their walls,” against those who “maddened by power, powered by madness,/closed their borders, then turned on their own.”

Drawing on Scottish and Irish Gaelic poetry and other literary and folk traditions, Moffatt reimagines contemporary and historical events — Syria, St Kilda, the Sudan, Latin American dictadura and the mass executions of Soviet Jews, Roma and prisoners of war by the SS — through Aesopian language, slipping between history, myth and memory.

It’s a powerful and original study of guilt, denial, innocence and complicity.

Money is a Kind of Poetry (Smokestack, £7.99) by Irish poet Peter Donnelly is a stunning meditation on contemporary alienation and the processes by which every new technological advance seems to increase our isolation from each other.

The more connected we are the less we appear to know ourselves. The more money we have the poorer we feel.

Donnelly looks at the “poetry of numbers” — the symbolic value of money, the dead language of economists and bankers and its shiny promises and slippery meanings.

Money is “a god that feeds off belief,” demanding to be worshipped in the language of “timezones and currencies” in temples where “The ripple-effects in the markets/Undulate/Through display units” and “Exchange rates/Slip like tectonic plates.”

It’s an extraordinary vision of a violent and contemporary hell, “the lonely Inferno/Of the stock market floor” where “the money is digesting itself;

“As money vanishes further and further/From the weighted — from gold, coffers —/And thins out into dust motes/And then air, disintegrating through the ether…/ The gaping blackness is irreversible.”

Fran Lock’s Ruses and Fuses (Culture Matters, £8) is a welcome follow-up to her first collection, Muses and Bruises.

The book is an attempt to recover the English Dissenting tradition “from the slimy sediment of state education in which they’d been immured and to connect their struggles with our own.” An example is Cable Street 1936/1981:

“the uniforms were flocking. we would not let them pass./there was broken glass in the treads of our second-hand shoes. 81 was more of the same… the national front in hobnail squadrons out on some brutalist/errand… black shirts like comic/vampires. a picket line and a prison riot, a diplock court,/a brick through your window…we’re heading for orgreave.”

There are some remarkable poems here in celebration of Nedd Ludd, John Lilburne, the Pendle Witches, Fergus O’Connor, the Cambridge spies, Dale Farm, William Morris and the women’s suffrage movement.

Best of all is turning earth, a beautiful poem about Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers:

“god holds us all in the hollow of his hand, costing/our melt-weight. from boy to man. stripling into/ingot. i see it now, we are more precious we are/not less base. our swords, they are not morphing/into ploughshares, and every cutting blade insists/upon its own utopian intercourse. god is not found,/but made. we have smithied his kingdom, reckoned it level with/hot dull force. they call this treason.”