POETRY: The Idea of Islands(Occasional Press, €26.75 hbk or €20.50 pbk, including postage) is a beautifully produced collaboration between two sometime residents of the Cill Rialaig artists' colony, the painter Donald Teskey and the writer Sue Hubbard, who have taken Cill Rialaig's setting on the Iveragh Peninsula as their subject.

Teskey's drawings of this corner of southwest Kerry lower black skies and cliffs on to white surf and houses, sometimes stitching them together with telephone wires and fences. His landscapes are remarkably dynamic, offering you ringside seats at the verge of the Atlantic coast. Their scale and force are difficult to describe in words, and Hubbard's poems are set a difficult task to accompany them. Some of her images are terrifically alive, particular and in keeping with Teskey's tones: in Five Ways of Looking at an Islandshe describes the "spittle-white surf" and then observes how a

shredded sliver of (blue) fertilizer bag

flaps

on the barbed wire fence –

as the black dot of a crow

pecks

the bleached skull of a sheep

Later in this poem, however, Hubbard’s introduction of a lyrical resolution, a sort of subjective correlative to the images, seems unconvincingly general, a wrong turn, as the poem’s speaker responds to the view of the island with:

a soft inhalation,

a letting go . . .

of all the words for love . . .

Elsewhere, Hubbard looks for other ways of making images of flux match up to human experience, but these poems also tend to push their images into more predictable narratives, reaching for the region's historic depopulation, territory covered in more detail by Daragh Breen's book-length sequence Across the Sound: in the "penitent dark" of St Fionan, Hubbard remembers the lost craft of currach-making, "lashing with thongs, / till our fingers bled / the three chiselled benches", and sees the empty cottages as "granite-faced as grieving widows" ( Cill Rialaig).

Ger Reidy's second book finds the poet Drifting under the Moon(Dedalus Press, €11), a title that catches the book's sometimes lonesome and melancholy tone. Here is a recognisable but heightened vision of the west of Ireland as a zone of estrangement. Reidy's poems lean towards parable, an effect he often generates by the unlikely juxtaposition of ordinary images, as in Winter Evening:

Then time to feed silage to the shorthorns

in the limekiln field, to study the Punic wars

and tie a shivering dog to a railway sleeper.

Father watched Hawaii Five-O.

This is not far removed from the Mayo gothic of Paul Durcan and Mike McCormick, but Reidy is more attuned to the artifices of his work, and there are wry asides on the quiet life the poems observe, as when Sunday Morning with Dognotes: "Move the milk carton and all will be lost". Reidy is less successful when he sets up broader, social scenarios whose quick switches of focus lead to the aimless satire of, for example, Lame Dogs,which begins: "McHale sold a dry cow at the mart, / his wife died last year."

The poems strive hard for signs and significance, but Fools Goldponders well the unregarded nature of his own material, nodding too at Seamus Heaney's The Tollund Man when Reidy describes a bog body "waiting in vain to be discovered, freeze — / framed into inarticulate verb".

Grace Wells's When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things(Dedalus Press, €12) is a various and exuberant first collection. The first poem, prefaced by a long quotation from John Osborne, is inauspicious: condensed and bitty, it is vague about its subject and its speaker as they "stumble . . . into the territory of becoming". It is a poor choice to open the book, because most of Wells's poems are very specific, moving fluently and expressively between images and asides, at home with the privacies of love and with the social public themes that they approach with candour and confidence. Poems about the second World War ( Bequestand Canada) jostle against narratives of poverty and family abuse ( Priory Lane; The Only Medicineand Rescue), but Wells's poems are as defined by their strong music as by their subject matter – Woman Riding a Cockends: "These marvels are not enough. More is asked for. I acquiesce / Wander the desert, cut and tucked, striking cocks with a plastic staff."

Wells's longer poems and sequences emerge from a recognisable intellectual position, liberally critical of contemporary Ireland and occasionally nostalgic, but her best poems are also grounded in odd romances and a keenly sensuous apprehension of the fields and ditches and hedges they often describe, as in the closing lines of All Souls:

There was so little in me that was humble,

one small white stitch of campion?

The rest was an orchestra, a riot,

nettle, hypericum, foxglove,

strawberry, celandine, pignut,

goutweed, woundwort, mint.

I wanted to heal all ills, to be

the mantle of the hedgerows,

all they stood for, all they were worth.

John McAuliffe's second collection, Next Door, was published by Gallery in 2007, and his pamphlet, A Midgie,is just out from Smith/Doorstop. He held the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University this year