John Cooper Clarke arrives with the same trick he's always had: rhythm as delivery vehicle for ideas that would be banal if anyone else said them. Have It works best when he trusts the compression — 'Me and my shrinking crowd / Each under our own personal cloud' lands because it doesn't explain itself. Where it wobbles is when the performance instinct overwhelms the poem on the page; Clarke has always needed a room, and not every piece here survives the transition to silence. Still, the punk-laureate persona is earned, not cosplay, and his advocacy for 'the blood royal of the working class' reads less like a slogan than a manifesto with a beat. Mary Mulholland's The Dodo Stories is the collection here most worth tracking. A debut that digs into Portuguese indenture, Caribbean migration, and intergenerational silence — and finds language for it that doesn't reach for the picturesque by accident. 'purpleheart, greenheart, spiny fiddleheart, and palms that walk by themselves, shift-shape' earns its strangeness. The mother-figure at the centre, the 'exotic morpho mother' called Dodo, gives the book an emotional fulcrum that the historical research alone couldn't provide. Debuts this assured, with this much archival material welded to this much lyric control, are not common. Ian McMillan's Red River Valley is exactly what it says it is: a Barnsley poet writing about barbershops, cricket clubs, and motorways, with the surreal bleeding in at the edges. These poems don't want to unsettle you. They want to find the 'touch of the sublime' in winter evening games and they mostly do. The social commentary on austerity is wry rather than furious, which is either a strength or a limitation depending on what you came for. McMillan is a reliable, warm, generous poet who has never pretended to be otherwise. Roger Robinson's Some Sacred Harbour collects work from a career that has already won major prizes, and the scope earns the 'selected' framing. The poems centering Black Atlantic identity and communal memory work through sonic accumulation — Robinson is a musician as well as a poet, and the ear shows. The 'miracles of synchronicity and signalled kinship' line captures what he does: find the shared frequency beneath disparate experiences. This is work that rewards rereading precisely because it operates through resonance, not argument. Carolyn Forché's Otherwhere is the landmark in this roundup, and the only one that warrants the weight of the word. Five collections across five decades, a preface that lays out a poetics of witness with the confidence of someone who has lived it, and a new Ukraine sequence that tests the limits of language against the reality of bombed hospitals and schools. 'if there is something to write that would raise the cities / from the ruins... I would give everything to fill this pen with it' — that is not rhetoric. That is the problem of witness poetry stated at its most honest. Whether you come to Forché new or returning, Otherwhere is where to start and where to stay.
