LOUIS MacNEICE IS a yardstick for poets. Poetry “must be honest before anything else”, he said, and “I refuse to be objective or clear cut at the expense of honesty”. The centenary of his birth is celebrated with a new and scrupulously assembled Collected Poems (Faber, £30/offer £27) in which works are presented not chronologically but according to the collections in which they were originally published.

From his first Auden-influenced forays to the late urgency of The Burning Perch, his posthumous but impassioned last book, this volume unfolds the multi-faceted vision of a poet whom the reader can be sure he can trust.

A vividly innovative poet and classical scholar, the Canadian Anne Carson turns her attention to Euripides. In his day the Athenian was valued for his power to shock and reveal. With her alert ear for dialogue, instinctive sense of the poetry of language and honed sensitivities as a translator, Carson cuts to the quick of the text.

In Grief Lessons (New York Review Books, £11.99/ £10.79) a poet who has been described as the “philosopher of heartbreak” offers a flexible, enlivening and imaginative contemporary translation, encompassing anything from the tautly-strung passions of tragedy to the everyday. Carson knows how to give every word a presence, to endow it with a sense of particularity that gives it a fresh power.

Jacob Polley has followed his impressively vivid debut with Little Gods (Picador, £8.99/£8.09). He sees the world with fierce intensity, but in this latest book the flinty curiosity of the child gives way to a darker, more brooding mood. Here are mysterious mythological narratives and love poems with a sinister touch. The rhymes and rhythms lure you onwards – but you often land up in a sombre place.

Multi-culturalism need not be worthy. Daljit Nagra makes a warm, witty, mischievous and sometimes painfully moving debut in Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, £8.99/£8.09), which explores the experience of a second-generation Punjabi immigrant to Britain. A frank and original voice “foots it featly as a Punjab in Punglish”. This is fresh and delightful.

Neil Astley pursues the phenomenal success of his Staying Alive anthology with Soul Food (Bloodaxe, £7.99/£7.19). Calling it a collection of “nourishing poems for starved minds” makes it sound rather too like the literary equivalent of chicken soup, but it offers a wide range. Here are the thoughts of writers from Trappist monks to Zen masters, from William Blake to writers from Bloodaxe’s own extensive stable. These poems illuminate the path of life.

“There is no one secret to reading a poem,” Ruth Padel says, “but the nearest I know is to think of it as a journey.” Inviting the reader to become her travelling companion, she sets out across the contemporary terrain in The Poem and the Journey (Chatto, £12.99/ £11.69). A lively introduction to basic concepts and tropes is followed by close readings of a selection from 60 writers. Lucid, accessible and rigorously probing, this is an enlivening, illuminating book.

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