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Why Are You Shouting?, James Womack's fourth Carcanet collection, thinks about two things in particular: our struggle as individuals to find connections between ourselves, with friends, family and lovers, and the efforts we make as groups to connect to the environment we live and die in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years, the poems set out to find points of hope and solidarity, against a common backdrop of disruption and collapse to which we are often wilfully blind. Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection's title suggests that raising one's voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in. The ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunts the collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to willed ignorance. 'The God of whom I speak is dead. I did my makeup in a disco ball. I looked at the whole magnificent creation of the Lord, and asked, sadly, "Is it cake?"'

'I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms, ' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell - 'an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely' - collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in 'Root Vegetables'. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris - 'Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction' - 'time-hedged cottages' and the earthbound in all its fragility.

Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps. Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.