Often poems conjure an event, a lyric occasion marked by stillness and observation. But in a year characterised by frenzy, political anticlimax and uncertainty, poetry should afford us no such luxury. As the American poet Robert Lowell wrote “history has to live with what was here, / clutching and close to fumbling all we had”. Each of these collections takes a long view of the present, often expanding the single isolated poem to a wider book-length analysis. The poets ask not how history will live with what was, but how we come to terms with our history now.

After a soldier kills Petya, a young deaf boy in Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (Faber), the townspeople of Vasenka protest by refusing to hear: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.” This dramatic narrative poem follows the lives of two married puppeteers, Sonya and Alfonso, as well as others, whose resistance unfolds into a searing indictment against authoritarianism. “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement for hours.” Echoing Kaminsky’s native Russia and the US where he now lives, Vasenka is a fictional stage where his prophecy is meted out with dark humour, gorgeous language and surprising tenderness.

Jay Bernard’s much acclaimed debut Surge (Chatto & Windus) centres on the the 1981 New Cross fire, which resulted in the deaths of 14 young black British people and the anti-racist movement that followed. Bernard’s polyvocal account emerges partly from research in London’s George Padmore Institute archives. A documentary approach to black radical history – suppressed, acknowledged, forgotten – warns that the injustices of the past must not repeat similar violence in the present. The Grenfell Tower fire is invoked; echoes of the Windrush scandal are discernible. A range of poetic forms, and at times volatile lineation, bring energy to this reappraisal of race, nation and embodiment.

The powerful title poem of Anthony Anaxagorou’s After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins) layers definitions of race with a family’s history of migration. Coined by Jacques de Breze to distinguish between groups of dogs in 1481, formulations of “race” alternate with racist quotations from Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell and Nigel Farage. Otherness is key, as is the pernicious question, where are you really from? implied by the formalities of address throughout His crystalline language, brevity, use of space, gaps and silence all commit themselves to accounting for this loss, or the “violence in forgetting”.

Like his earlier books, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (Picador) makes use of traditional poetic forms as well as his own formulation, the “duplex”, a set of ghazal-like couplets. “A poem is a gesture toward home. / It makes dark demands I call my own.” The effect of this is incantatory, recalling most obviously the cadences of Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking”. Brown applies similar sonic pressure to lines that berate whiteness and racism against African Americans as he does to the mythologising of black male experience and state violence (cannily rhyming “red” with “incarcerated”). The tradition here specifically is a heroic inheritance made vivid and visible, one that refuses to be erased.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Vivid and visible’ ... Jericho Brown. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Deryn Rees-Jones’s Erato (Seren) takes its title from the classical muse for love poetry and song. A mix of lyric essays and verse forms, the book returns fluidly and insightfully to the relationship between the self and memory, in particular trauma and loss. “I thought about truth and I thought about lies. I thought about love and all its erasures.” Erato also suggests erratum, or error, another preoccupation of the psyche as it holds and withholds time from the collective and the individual: a lover, a neighbour, a metamorphosing animal or tree. Rees-Jones moves between prose and poetry as if to test language in the act of transfiguration. Her imagination interpolates the personal body in the political and natural worlds with deep sensuousness, a muscular intelligence.

A dreamlike, allegorical darkness inhabits both Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland (Faber) and Juana Adcock’s Split (Blue Diode). Both collections consist of sequences that excavate the vulnerability of women’s bodies against dangerous social and national landscapes. The title poem of Allen’s debut is stunning and sinister; it begins: “The dark village sits on the crooked hill. / There is a plot of impassable paths towards it”. Innocence gives way to the brutal, transactional consumption of flesh: sex, murder, meat. Similarly, Adcock’s poem “Juarez/Ecatapec” chillingly gives voice to murdered and disappeared women in the notorious Mexican border town: “We were taken down to the river, all eleven girls. / We had stopped being useful for one thing.” An extended dialogue between a woman and a serpent begins the book; it is unnerving, moving and engrossing.

• Save up to 30% on the books of the year at guardianbookshop.com