POETRY:IN AN ARTICLE in the current issue of the Edinburgh Review,Leontia Flynn writes of her realisation that "amid all other kinds of technological communication . . . I have to think that poetry can do something unique. That . . . it can communicate something a bit more complex and lasting."

Flynn’s article allows her work to be aligned with the emergence of the so-called new sincerity in recent Anglo-American fiction, a body of literature that eschews the self-conscious tricks of postmodern writing as an end in themselves and embraces the positive and life-affirming value of art. As Flynn puts it in the same essay, “I find I don’t fancy formal experiments any more unless they rise out of some encounter with life.”

In her latest book, Profit and Loss(Cape Poetry, 62pp, £10), Flynn puts these ideas – they could be called principles – into full effect. The allusion to TS Eliot in the volume's title (see section IV of The Waste Land) is one of a number of moments when one realises one is in the company of a poet who is also a serious poetry scholar – Flynn wrote a PhD on the poetry of Medhbh McGuckian.

Profit and Lossis also a book of searing personal and social insight, however. The group of 29 poems in the first part (subtitled, appropriately, "A Gothic") examines the nature and experience of habitation – from flat-hunting and home-owning to house-haunting – with striking imagistic precision.

While Flynn has a real gift for identifying images and keeping watch on the world – a gift on virtuoso display in poems such as The Dream House, The Oven, The Flatsand Reminders– she is also a poet who uses language and form not just to conjure word pictures but to tell her readers something worth knowing about the world. In this regard, the first part of Profit and Lossspeaks to the existential experience of displacement as much as it reflects on the fallout of the property crisis, a theme explored also in Letter to Friends, which makes up the second part of the book.

Throughout these poems, and even in the somewhat slighter lyrics gathered in the final part of the book – which includes, nonetheless, beautifully rendered love poems after Catullus, an epithalamion, and one of the best poems about parenthood written in recent years – Flynn's place as one of the strongest and most skilful poetic voices of her generation is confirmed in Profit and Loss.

In Letter to FriendsFlynn's speaker asks the same questions addressed in her Edinburgh Review essay, but in verse form they are posed with brilliant formal dexterity. The poet's voice speaks clearly through the stanzas of this poem in lines that are rhymed and enjambed with exemplary wit and syntactical care:

But here, though, poetry – the Holy Grail

so long – the language at its highest power,

has got its marks back from the public: fail

and fail again. The reasons for this are

a) that it’s quaint and b) that it’s obscure;

its flourishes and willed opacities

are verbal tics The People can’t forgive.

The problem is we’re not sure what it’s for . . .

It’s out of step with our capacities

for being literal – and lucrative

like visual art in London when it ‘Shocks!’

Flynn's decision to cast her verse letter in a form famously used by WH Auden in his Letter to Lord Byron– the "conversational song" in which he said the "average poet" is "unobservant, immature, and lazy" – was spot on. Like Auden, she addresses important issues here in a language that is both playful and serious, and in a form that is, if not "large enough to swim in", at least robust enough to contain the many concerns she raises in it, from the delights and torments of personal and familial memory to the function and value of poetry in (postmodern) society.

THE POEMS INJohn McAuliffe's Of All Places(The Gallery Press, 72pp, €11.95) are also said to contain "a hint of Auden's formal patterns" in a back-cover note. It is undoubtedly McAuliffe's strongest collection to date, and the poems in it reveal the poet's sincere concern with communicating something useful out of his everyday encounters with the world. Poems such as House Fire, Bringing the Baby to Rossaveal, Week 2and The Hallway Mirrorgive generous insights into domesticity and family life, but Of All Placesalso contains strong new poems by McAuliffe on broader social and historical themes. Among the most significant of these are Crash, which deals with the downfall of Roger Casement, and Transfers, a poem based partly on "the sale of works of art from the Bank of Ireland collection" in 2010.

McAuliffe sometimes allows his poems to become "too neat and a little too close to whatever we call home", as he puts it himself in Marriage, the Realist Tradition. At times he seems to throw in the towel just when things are getting interesting or tough. And yet the acknowledgment that the poet or poetry cannot provide all the answers is important in itself if what McAuliffe calls "the free drift to nowhere in particular" in the book's opening poem (Old Style) is to be attempted. As the speaker of that striking lyric puts it:

Not just the lay-by, or the motorway

or its central reservation.

Not just the ring road, or the cul-de-sac

with its pretty forsythia border.

Not just the house, or its extension,

and its hundred windows shining away.

Instead the known world and the unseen,

to which you’ll come back:

Despite moments of curious self-doubt – in The Whole Show,for example, or in A Midgie, the volume's disappointingly slight closing poem – the journeys McAuliffe made "to the known world and the unseen" in the making of this book have been worth the effort. Of All Placesis a compelling third collection.

Philip Coleman lectures in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin. He has edited the forthcoming 'Forever Young?' The Changing Images of Americawith Stephen Matterson