London’s first Young Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire was catapulted into the spotlight when her poetry was used in the film of Beyoncé’s 2016 “visual album”, Lemonade. And now comes the 33-year-old’s long-awaited – it has been promised since 2016 – book-length debut, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.

As in her two earlier pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body, here Shire channels the voices of those who have been forced to migrate. Born in Kenya in 1988 to Somali parents who fled the civil war in their country, Shire came to London when she was one year old. For many female refugees who have tried to assimilate in the West, these poems suggest, war is a perpetual condition that never leaves the body. In “Bless the Ghost II”, it is a “shroud circling her skull” that “lathers her back in the shower,/ sometimes embracing her/ from behind, weighing/ down her shoulders”.

The collection’s conflicted poems about motherhood (Shire herself is a mother-of-two) might be read as confessional poetry, though Shire has insisted that “most of my work is not about me”. Still, the first poem of the collection, “Extreme Girlhood” – in which gender inequality, body dysmorphia and being born a black girl combine in a looping “prelude to suffering” – would seem to fit that confessional label. But it is also a good indicator of why Shire’s work resonates so much with young women, as it did with Beyoncé, regardless of their race or nation.

Shire’s strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally. In “Bless the Gun Tossed into a River”, inspired by André Breton’s poem “Freedom of Love”, the speaker’s brother has “a fistfight for a mouth,/ and a bag of ice for a father,/ with skin the colour of a/ Crimewatch reconstruction”. Sylvia Plath might have written like this, if she had been a black refugee from Somalia.

Many of the poems here are reworked from previously published versions. “Home”, which seems to have settled into its definitive, tighter version here, and its counterpart, “Home II”, previously titled “Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Centre)”, are a case in point. A former iteration of “Home” became perhaps Shire’s best-known poem in 2015, when Benedict Cumberbatch read it to theatre audiences in protest of the Syrian migrant crisis. Months later, extracts appeared on placards during protests against Donald Trump’s migrant ban. Transformed into a prose-poem to match “Home II”, and with additional queasily vivid descriptions of escape from war, “Home” now leans more towards story than the soundbite-generating format of its previous iteration, which was arranged in shorter lines. Working together as a unit in the middle of the collection, “Home”, “Home II”, “Bless the Ghost” and “Bless the Ghost II” are the emotional spine on which the painful brilliance of the collection hangs.

In addition to prose-poems, Shire also uses specular poems (where lines from the first half are repeated, in reverse order, in the second) and haiku-like forms in free verse to shape short, pithy poems that rarely spill over the page. Shire writes with the clear, direct language of activism, turning to Somali words as a shortcut when English lacks a direct equivalent – a handy glossary at the back defines terms such as “baati” (Somali house dress) and “qumayo” (a cruel person) – or to give a sense of familial intimacy, as with “hooyo” (mother, or sometimes a metaphor for home) and “aabo” (father).

The word “bless” is an enthralling rhythmic refrain that runs throughout the book, often starting a line. Appearing in almost half the poems’ titles and peppered in random stanzas, it frames the collection, even as the poems’ themes range from pop culture (“Bless Grace Jones”), to eating disorders (“Bless the Bulimic”).

By dint of all those blessings and Shire’s sensitivity, the poetry in Bless the Daughter soothes, even while it picks at the scabs of the wounds that cause trauma. Ultimately, the book feels like Shire is performing a benediction, laying trauma’s ghosts to rest.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head is published by Chatto & Windus at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop