The Australian poet Les Murray’s The Biplane Houses (Bloodaxe £8.95) is his first full-length volume for seven years, and very welcome. It is rare to find a writer who carries the reader along with such exuberant delight in the art, even through a number of defiantly puzzling passages. Some excellent poets can be difficult to quote from. Murray provides an embarrassment of choices: on animal noses (“ no stench is infra dog”), or money (“The more invisible the money / the vaster and swifter its action”), or dolphins (“like 3D surfboards / born in the ocean, (they) curvet / around fenced oyster gardens”).

Poems such as The Domain of the Octopus (the one last quoted) recall the English Martian school of the 1970s, but Murray’s extravagant, risk-taking imagery comes with less contrivance. One house on a suburban road in The Brick Funnel resembles a “grounded moustache”, another “a baked apple made of felt”, a third “a great cloth over an uncleared feast”. When the human nose encounters citrus fruit, “an orange is an irrigation / of rupture and bouquet / rocking the lower head about”, while “one of the milder borders / of the just endurable / is the squint taste of a lemon”.

Murray is not an easy poet; yet he can be amazingly rewarding in poems where you have to work a bit to match the complexity of his images with the landscapes he is trying to capture in them. Usually those are Australian landscapes (though not always; he has a fresh slant on Travelling the British Roads in the poem of that name). Pastoral Sketches is a delightful new take on the land he has worked as a farmer. Sunday on a Country River involves crossing “low country on parole from floods”, disturbing pelicans and almost giving up when it “gets hairy . . . / muddy blonde, growing just underwater”. That sinister note recurs in several poems, but he emerges from Panic Attack with a cure for his (and anyone’s) nightmares: “Relax. In time, your hourglass / will be reversed again.”

It became a necessity for Tim Liardet to write about his year teaching in a large young offenders’ prison, the experience having generated so many “lightning-sketches of feeling and ideas”. But his book appears only after four more years spent overcoming understandable fears and doubts about this grim enterprise. The outcome, The Blood Choir (Seren £7.99), is a work of extraordinary perception and honesty, unsparing with the harsh detail of how the prisoners adjusted to institutional life, learnt strategies of showing-off and bullying, and taunted their teacher: “They began by repeating all my words / Now don’t do that, please; now don’t do that, pleeeese . . .”

A class of 20 becomes one beast “in its warpaint of tattoos . . . perfect / for the world it must enter and smash to bits”, then disperses into a rollcall of individuals yelling at dawn or shouting from cell windows at dusk, aggressively yawning, gazing at their shoes, implicitly envying the liberty of spaniels beyond the barbed wire or of the wasp or bird trapped in their room. The foot-and-mouth epidemic allows a parallel with what goes on in the prison environment. When slaughtered animals are heaped onto a pyre outside, it “burns, for days, beneath the skin of the dispossessed, // the tenderer skin of the heath’s prison boys”. Judges, lawyers and guards, whose shadows figure only faintly in this world, could learn much from Liardet’s powerful account. And nobody who believes that poetry could occasionally address brutal realities should miss it.

Ruth Fainlight’s Moon Wheels (Bloodaxe £8.95) is a generous selection from past, out-of-print work alongside new poems and some translations. She wonders whether her restlessness suggests “a lifetime / trying to feel at home”. Yet the more domestic and intimate poems here are among her best: recalling an eccentric uncle, waiting for a loved one at an airport, or realising she still sleeps in childhood blankets “now potent and dangerous / as plague-infected blankets thrown / over the walls of a city besieged, / or exchanged for the sacred land // of people with no more immunity / to the pathogens they carried, than I / to the fevers of memory”.

The translations (her own poetry seems to have gained in strength and range from working on them) include versions from César Vallejo (Peru) and Maria Negroni (Argentina). The Mexican Victor Manuel Mendiola is represented by Your Hand, My Mouth, a surreal sequence about plates, eating and lovemaking. Fainlight does splendid justice to this crazily entertaining fantasy.

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