POETRY:ARTFUL, STEEPED in the craft and recognisably engaged with and troubled by contemporary Ireland, three new collections should introduce new readers to a strong generation of Irish poets, while more regular poetry readers will be excited to see distinctive voices highlighted to good effect.

Gerard Fanning is an intriguing poet. His individual and stylish combination of outre image and conversational understatement is evident in Waiting on Lemass, the first poem of his new book, Hombre: New and Selected Poems(Dedalus Press, 102pp, €20/€12.50). Only Fanning would piece together a poem that alludes to Beckett's play and includes an overtly poetic phrase such as "white hour" alongside the more humdrum "none the wiser" in order to bear witness to "a president slumped // on his girlfriend's knee" and to a man "hitting golf balls / as if there was no tomorrow".

Fanning's other poems are equally quick, atmospheric and exotic. Typically, he adopts personas: the poems from the collections Easter Snow and Working for the Government introduce Kim Philby, Art Pepper and other characters, including William Glenn, Matt Kiernan and Elizabeth Bishop, who guide him and his readers through depth-charged emotional and political landscapes, as in Daytrip to Vancouver:

Nightfall, and we rode the ferry

back to our miniature selves

caught smiling on the mantelpiece,

delighted it could be so simple.

Is it the speaker who is delighted or is it the naive couple in the photograph? Out of such distinctions Fanning crafts ironic and unsettling poems. And although he may take us on wild trips and occasionally obscure detours, he also manages pithy, quotable conclusions, such as, "the man who gestures to a fault / will explain the value of nothing" ( Film Noir).

Water and Power, his third collection, contributed a newly mortal heft to his work’s admirably fancy footwork, as when the speaker of Wide of the Mark has the premonition – call it intuition – that this is all by the way,

even as my nurse

is coaxing a mirror

down the lining of my oesophagus,

pointing like an idiot savant

to the very heart of things

or when we hear, with the poet, “Again and again the morse of repairs, / bones chattering in some oratory” (Canower Sound).

Hombresupplements its selection from his first three collections with 25 new poems. These dwell, beautifully, in a world whose byways, cherished objects and weather feel as if they might at any moment address themselves to us, saying "there is more to this / than you might think" (The Verandah) while also admitting, in self-aware tones that call to mind Derek Mahon, "And we come, mere functionaries, / to check a minor river // and its tributaries, to count / palisades as mooring posts // [. . .] like the stories that fade / along excavated pots" (Low Tide).

KERRY HARDIE'S FIRSTcollection, A Furious Place, was one of the most striking debuts of the 1990s, and it is a pleasure now to reread the astonishing At St Laserian's Cathedral, Old Loughlin, whose final stanza gives the book its title:

And I think what a furious place

is the heart: so raw and so pure and so shameless.

We both drink the water. I drink with defiance

and you drink without it. No one is watching, but God,

and He doesn’t care, except for the heart’s intention.

That poem’s big organ music, its clear tones and phrasing are present throughout Hardie’s new book, Selected Poems (Gallery Press, 96pp, €20/€12.50). The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach.

Hardie's poems admit disappointment alongside achievement ("After the urgent work, I have sat with this piece / trying to understand; failing," she writes in the long sequence Exiles), and sickness alongside health ("sometimes even sickness is generous," she writes in She Replies to Carmel's Letter, "and takes you by the hand and sits you / beside things you would otherwise have passed over"). Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing, what she describes herself as the "strange thin moment that's see-through to somewhere else".

Hardie’s later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once. She has two recent poems about phone calls. One is called Communication and begins, wonderfully, “My father wouldn’t talk on the phone”, and later admits, “Alone in the house, I let the phone ring for days.” The second poem is called Solitude, which describes its speaker, having “hardly seen anyone for days”, spending a day out of the house. It ends:

When I got home the phone was ringing,

I had the key in the door but it wouldn’t turn.

I heard the phone cease in the empty house.

And the dogs milled about.

And the pumpkin stared out at the moon.

EVA BOURKE'S Piano(Dedalus Press, 120pp, €12.50) won't live in a world where "poets only compose elegies, composers funeral marches" or "suffer sadness, gladly" (Lacrimae Reum). Bourke repeatedly and imperatively asks us to praise the things of this world, a task suited to her rich, copiously descriptive poems. Packed with astonishing images and detailed observations of her surroundings in Boston and Berlin, in Galway, Belfast and all points between, this is a book to relish. One detail, from Chinese Garden, is typical of her surprising and sometimes lightly whimsical way with images: "A crane winds his long neck round / one knee joint and stares / into the cosmos of its claws."

Bourke’s prose poems tell fabulous stories, while her response to WG Sebald’s first published work, Elementary Poem, is a tour de force. Her tributes to other artists include a poem about Pearse Hutchinson, whose travels and chiming consonantal music are close kin to Bourke’s own work.

Piano is loosely organised around different kinds of music, and the poems respond to Bach and birdsong, but take on an equally unstoppable and excited momentum in the absence of sound:

Silence and absence.

Go up close. Your heart in your mouth.

Pressing your ear against the door, listen

to spiders glide across the black and white

piano keys, the hammers softly touch the strings,

the pedals – or somebody breathing – rise and fall,

the wind play funeral marches on a minor scale

(The Garden at the Road’s End)

John McAuliffe’s third collection,

Of All Places

, will be published by the Gallery Press this summer. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester