AS THAT ENCHANTING short-story writer Raymond Carver observed: “One of the great things about living longer is getting to know more of the story.” But for his widow, Tess Gallagher, the dead remain the story.

Her ghosts inhabit the world around her, and her ability to hijack ordinary logic makes them equally present for us; two dead birds, for instance, discovered in one afternoon, “lets strange sky into the mind”. Only a Russian - or perhaps an Irish - woman could be so confident of a numinous world.

Her visions are not the less grounded in the everyday. Her husband enters a dream carrying a bag of powdered doughnuts and two paper cups of coffee. She remembers their pleasure in eating goblets of raspberries in February, relishing the fruit while conscious of the probable child-slavery underlying such out-of-season luxury.

Image after image res-onates through these poems: “Sleep is not / the quicksand it seems.” Her sick mother holds on to life and her “suffering / is such oxygen we do not consider it”.

Gallagher herself has had surgery more than once, and - presumably after chemo-therapy - compares herself wryly to the shaved women of Auschwitz.

Yet the poems are filled with love: for Ireland, where she spends part of each year, for wildlife, especially badgers, for friends, and for the countryside where she can enjoy: Brown bread. Strong tea.

In the bath: whiskey-coloured

water

from the river.

In Europe, she resists the “tourniquet/of irony”. With a Romanian translator in Bucharest, she is “drunk on poetry”. In an epigraph quoted from her own notebook she writes:

That’s what poems are for,

Unliveable love.

Fiona Sampson burst on to the literary landscape as the brilliant young editor of Poetry Review a couple of years ago. She had already published 14 books of her own, including essays as well as poetry. In Common Prayer. her subject is darkness of many kinds, erotic or lonely, histories of Eastern Europe, abandonment. She finds a subtle suggestion of sexual gesture in unexpected places: Darkness opens like a gate again; my fingers on your latch.

In the clatter of the Underground, a city poet’s Underworld, she names stations like “wayside shrines / on your journey in the dark” insisting on the solidity of presences that “ground / what flickers in you”.

Once a musician herself, Sampson’s poems sometimes use the music of 20th-century Modernism, here altogether faithful to the natural rhythms of speech. Some of the poems ripple like “a handful of stones against glass”, as she calls up Messaien’s piano. Yet she can handle closed forms. I was particularly drawn to several 14-line lyrics, which spell out the human need for love.

Thomas Kinsella is a long-established poet of a much older generation whose Selected Poems go back to the 1950s. He begins writing with the tune of Yeats’s stanza in his ear;

Dread, a grey devourer

Stalks in the shade of love.

In the early books, what is bookish is often best.

We drifted in peace and talked

of poetry.

I opened the Cantos, and chose

the silken kings

Luminous with crisis.

With “Phoenix Park”, however, phrases begin to strike home with an individual shock: “You lay still, brilliant with illness, behind glass.”

And his autobiographical poems become altogether unsentimental. He remembers being sent to say goodbye to a dying grandmother, looking at a mouth still lined with ill-temper, and failing to kiss the dying woman.

In one of the most original of these early poems, a child is seen from the perspective of a battered cuddly animal, and so reminds us of the frightening volatility of human mood swings.

As the book progresses we make out a deep distrust of the human spirit: “The irreducible malice and greed of the species.”

His flat propositions are irrefutable.

What is there to understand?

Time punishes - and this the flesh teaches.

An Irish nationalist, who has spent much of his life translating Irish poetry while teaching in the United States, his vision is as uncomfortable as Samuel Beckett’s; most of the people in his poems are blown by:

a poverty of spirit in the

wind,

a shabby richness in braving it.

Dear Ghosts Bloodaxe, £8.95; 160pp

Common Prayer Carcanet £9.95; 96pp

Selected Poems Carcanet, £9.95; 126pp

Buy the books here

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