IRISH poet WB Yeats once observed that “out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

It’s an unnecessary distinction that feeds into lazy ideas about public versus private, propaganda versus art. On the other hand, it is sometimes hard to find ways of writing that simultaneously address “others” and “ourselves.”

There are brilliant new examples of how to do it, one of them being Martin Thom’s Fair (Infernal Methods, £5), a satirical attack on the DSEI arms fair held in London every year. Its specific target is the selling of weapons to the Saudi government for use in Yemen. Part of the proceeds from the sale of the book is going to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Written in 300 loose rhyming iambic tetrameters, the poem draws on Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy. Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth may be long gone, but “Murder, Fraud and Anarchy” are still with us, represented now by such loathsome creatures as Liam Fox, Michael Fallon and Amber Rudd who, as Home Secretary, decided to allow only privy counsellors access to the long-awaited report into the external funding of domestic extremism in Britain.

“What would Shelley find to say/Of Murder met with on his way? And what would Hone or Cruickshank do/with this dismal heartless crew?” asksThom.

It’s a clever, witty, memorable and shout-out-loud poem, compelling and ferocious in its depiction of those who make money by selling “the instruments of Hell … Harm to school or hospital/In a hell-sent British shell” … “And in Hate’s train, the Masque of War,/There marches silent cholera/With scythe and drop and staring eyes/And mottled famine on parade.”

Paul Summers’s arise! (Culture Matters, £5) also draws on Shelley’s poem, not least in its title (“Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number”).

Sponsored by the Durham Miners Association for this year’s Durham Miners’ Gala and, with an introduction by DMA secretary Alan Cummings, 10 per cent of the proceeds of sales of the book are going to help develop its historic building in Durham into a cultural centre.

Over 400 lines long, the poem is written in short, compressed couplets of cold rage at the scoffers who are still announcing the end of history.

“so history is done/the shafts capped,/the breathless heaps/erased or made-over … a broken picket-line/of hunch-backed thistles,/a huddle of poppies/in a fly-tipped fridge.”

But Summers, whose own family were miners in Northumberland, also hears memory “nagging” and “niggling” in our veins, the whispered “yakka” in the genes, the names of seams and pits closed long ago still remembered “like a lyric/in dense pitmatic” and the “stubborn beat” of history “drumming/in our breaking heart.”

The second half of the poem imagines the forward march of Labour renewed, as history begins to “unlearn defeat.” Tradition and memory join the holiday crowds converging on Durham for the Big Meeting.

“hepburn, smillie,/cook & burt,/bickerstaffe, benn,/hopper & fynes … they join the ranks/of our procession … & so we march, to durham town/for the many/not the few./to build Jerusalem anew./history is done,/the cynics bark,/they do not hear it/singing through the dark … & so we march/& so we march /and so we march.”