Bloodshot Monochrome by Patience Agbabi
Canongate, £8.99 Buy the book here

The Lost Leader by Mick Imlah
Faber, £9.99 Buy the book here

Sea Change by Jorie Graham
Carcanet, £9.95 Buy the book here

Reading these three collections, I was struck by how differently these poets define their responsibility to their readers. Patience Agbabi has the clearest idea of who her audience is. A renowned performer of her work, in Bloodshot Monochrome Agbabi uses poetic form to continue her performance on the page. Foreign Exchange is the best of the collection's many sonnets. It describes a racist encounter in Hamburg:

...reminding me of school, that French exchange,
a simple sentence, Parce qu'elle est noire,
delivered at such speed and with such hatred
it stung me: to encounter so much rage;
more, for being judged solely by colour;
but most, the fact it had to be translated.

Unfortunately, Agbabi does not always craft her cadences and choose her rhymes so carefully. The sonnet sequence Vicious Circle tells the story of a film-noir love triangle. The story has plenty of intrigue and betrayal, but the sequence is marred by a relentless staccato rhythm, short sentences and repetitive syntax: the poems cry out for a performer to animate them.

Problem Pages is more assured. In this sequence, Agbabi plays agony aunt to 14 dead poets, who are having problems with their sonnets. We hear from canonical names (Milton, Keats), all-but-forgotten female poets (Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith) and key black poets (Claude McKay, June Jordan). It's a risky way of both invoking influences and putting them in their place, and testament to Agbabi's verve and confidence that she pulls it off.

To move from Agbabi to Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader is to feel the poetic line slowing and the texture thickening. You're going to have to work harder, but these subtle poems will repay return visits. The Lost Leader is a book of enormous ambition: 20 years in the making and twice as long as most slim volumes, it offers a poetic history of Scotland starting at the year dot (“before/ Colum and Camelot”). Along the way, we hear from some familiar and not-so-familiar Scottish heroes: Robert the Bruce and Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Gordon Brown (the rugby player, not the politician).

The collection ends with a stunning, full-throated lyric that draws parallels between rejected art and the stars. The poet wonders

if they dream away their loss of face in a sky like that;
if there, though day's glare or the northern night obscure them,
though nature has done with them, still through the void they hurtle their wattage,
powered with the purpose of having been - being, after all, stars,
whose measure we may not take, nor know the wealth of their rays.

Douglas Dunn offers one precedent for the consummate formal achievement of these poems, but otherwise Imlah situates himself among much earlier literary models: Edwin Muir, Robert Browning and James Thomson. Indeed Imlah remains hard to place on a map of contemporary Scottish poetry. His playful-yet-elegiac formalism seems untouched by Don Paterson's satirical bite, or W. N. Herbert's surreal, knockabout humour. As a history of Scotland, The Lost Leader might be a late tackle; but as a display of poetic forms and resources, the collection is invaluable.

Jorie Graham is the most private of these three poets. While she has a considerable following in the US, and a growing number of admirers on these islands, her poetry does not seek out connections with the reader. Instead, Graham explores connections between her perceptions and experiences.

Sea Change is a series of meditations on political and environmental fears. Many poems begin in anxious observation: “Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms.” Graham is adept at capturing such moments. She is a poet of transitions and transformations, rather than closely painted images. No Long Way Round begins:

Evening. Not quite. High winds again.
I have time, my time, as you also do, there, feel
it. And a heart, my heart, as you do,
remember it. Also am sure of some things, there are errands, this was a voyage ...

To a greater extent than most poets would dare, Graham demands that poetry should answer to its moment. Her work can be difficult, and does not always avoid portentousness: “there is a form of slavery in everything”. Nevertheless, Graham's poetry is exhilarating because of its ability to open a space of clear-eyed hope. This hope is usually located in artistic creation or, as here, the silence that precedes the creative moment:

this will be a time again in which to make - a time of use-
lessness - the imagined human
paradise.

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