Swell by Maria Ferguson; There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen; Mind’s Eye by Carol Rumens; Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola; Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko

Swell by Maria Ferguson (Penguin, £10.99)
“When I lost that first pregnancy it was / deliciously warm”: Ferguson has a deftly startling way with a line break. Wry wit and honesty combine to make Swell a compelling narrative of marriage, pregnancy and motherhood. One moment the poet is rapt with wonder at an umbilical cord “that seemed to keep on coming / like a phone-wire stretched up the stairs”; the next she is observing of her tired husband that “Today love is leaving him / in bed at 5am”. The world of mother and baby groups and “hashtag self-care” enables a rich vein of comic material, but it is emotional exposure and fragility (“we are just teenagers, / new to each other, my body undiscovered / in this foreign state”) that makes Swell such a rewarding collection.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (Penguin Classics, £9.99)
While the fiction of Danish author Ditlevsen (1917-76) is well known in translation, her poetry has until now remained in its shadow. Bitter and dependable as a black coffee and a cigarette, these are hymns to desolation, disillusion, ennui and abandonment (“a childless mother / robbed of joy and grief, / clings to a dead lullaby / offering no relief”). Frustrated love is omnipresent (“I am a house someone has left, / Soon I’ll whisper the new owner’s name”). Feeling “devastated by a ragged tenderness” counts as a pretty good outcome, by Ditlevsen’s standards, and the reader comes away from these melancholy moments feeling pretty much the same.