It is intriguing how strong the pull of tradition remains in some recent poetry. Four books from poets spanning far-apart generations and backgrounds share an assumption that to “make it new”, in the way the resolute modernist Ezra Pound proclaimed more than seven decades ago, is definitely not obligatory.

In The Space of Joy (Chatto £10.99) John Fuller traces subtle and painful interconnections between artistic creativity and love in five real figures from the past and one fictional example. Relaxing in a hammock, he’s inspired by Petrarch’s adoration of Laura to write 35 sonnets, some unabashedly romantic: “Her eyes drank mine until my senses spun, / They were like fruit upon a living branch.” For Coleridge, he slips into affectionate pastiche of the conversational-meditative poems, reflecting on the joy and melancholy in marriage. Arnold in Thun is about the “lure” of love for the great Victorian in a small Swiss town where Brahms spent two creative years enjoying sights such as “a train puffing into the station / like an old gentleman expecting treats”. Love and its sacrifice for art’s sake feature in The Rivals – Sachs and Beckmesser figure in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Love and separateness underlie the poem Wallace Stevens at the Clavier with its respectful echoes of the American poet who died in 1955. The most successful of these dips into the past concerns Fuller’s nostalgia for a childhood visit to Thun. Here, all the motifs of the book come together wonderfully in the unnerving conclusion that, whether love happens or not, and whether or not art is sufficient salve and consolation, “To be alone / Is a condition of the observing brain / . . . And the heart goes out / Fiercely if frailly from its uncertain darkness.”

The starting point of Jacob Polley’s first book, The Brink (2003), was his rural working-class background, with traditional aspects of nature reexplored in a postindustrial world. Little Gods (Picador £8.99) partly maintains that theme, with minor debts to the Martian poets, to Edward Thomas (in the poems April and Rain), and to Baudelaire. Polley’s short narratives (such as The Egg or Night-Doll) grow more nightmarish, and the element of reticence and mystery in the earlier volume deepens in ambiguous love poems such as A Crow’s Skull “found beside the railway line / and bleached in a tin // then sent to you / before I knew // the trouble we were in”.

His Morning (“This is the hour of cold in the bones, / cold in the underwear”) would take second prize as a dawn poem way after the one to which it pays unwitting tribute, Philip Larkin’s Aubade; but that’s no disgrace. Mirror shows a postMartian precision, as does the even shorter Accordion. But it is in more ambitious poems, such as You, The Cheapjack and Sally Somewhere, that Polley’s talent extends promisingly into new areas. It is interesting, though, that Byre, one of the best in this arresting collection, finds him abandoning the traffic of the modern city for a place where a boy stands “with his hands on the flanks of the beasts / as they breathe”.

That is certainly true of Maurice Riordan’s third book, The Holy Land (Faber £8.99), with its evocation of County Cork in the 1950s in 18 “idylls” that seem too raw and real for that word, in their descriptions of half-mechanised agriculture battling a traditional world of drainage tasks, uncertain harvests, escaped bulls. There is also the Irish tradition of recalling the departed English, their estates and big houses. But Riordan’s main theme is mortality itself, the death of a father for whom the biggest change was in the framed photograph, kept poignantly in his inside pocket, of his mother on her honeymoon.

Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber £8.99) has been deservedly praised for the frankness and originality of its take on the experience of Punjabi immigrants in a Britain still not tolerant enough to accept them as human beings. There is, in fact, quite a long tradition of poetry in the fresh, colourful English of the incomer responding to a new country with incomprehension, anger or rueful humour; but Nagra adds to it with distinction in poems such as Singh Song! and The Furtherance of Mr Bulram’s Education.

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