Acclaimed for her ground-breaking achievement with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and as a Booker prize-winner for The Blind Assassin (2000), Margaret Atwood has also been a consistently talented poet, and The Door (Virago £9.99), her first collection since 1995, seems long overdue. Some poems here can appear like chips from the novelist’s workbench (War Photo, or The Nature of Gothic), but more often they stand confidently by themselves. Boat Song vividly imagines the orchestra on the Titanic; in The Third Age Visits the Arctic, she explores the oddity of growing old with undiminished intelligence and energy: “Off we go, unsteadily down the gangway, / bundled up in our fleecy layers, / . . . breasting – as they / once said – the icy waves / in our bouncing rubber boat, / so full of pills we rattle.” Her principal themes are memory and the sinister jolts it can deliver, home life with its bizarre shocks (the dead cat that a sister leaves wrapped in silk in the freezer), love and partnership – well if lengthily summed up in the poem Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later. Poets feature, an ambivalent, discomfiting lot (“the god of poets has two hands: / the dextrous, the sinister”), but finally we should be grateful for them. Admirers of Atwood’s fiction should be grateful for these direct, well-shaped, truthful poems.

Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book (Picador £8.99) follows quickly on from his highly praised translation of The Inferno. But its title, and one particular poem, recall The Tempest and Prospero’s drowning of his manual of magic. Is this a hint that these might be regarded as incidental poems dredged up from Dantesque depths after he had finished with The Inferno? Surely not. The influence of the translation task is patently in the background, but everything else his readers would expect of this poet is here: gritty argument, harsh images of industrial decay, leaps of sardonic imagination, political anger – Timor Mortis, Valedictory (a farewell to Margaret Thatcher) and Song: Habeas Corpus are small triumphs. Rivers, ponds, drains and water tend to dominate poems such as his tribute to the dead poet Julia Darling. Predict the emergence of a more relaxed manner in a poet – as one could with his last volume Downriver (2001) – and what arrives is more challenging. This volume requires concentration, but O’Brien conducts readers with firm and reliable hands through his underworld of “random malevolence” and “widowed expectation”.

Haunting fables of entrapment or imprisonment, of troubled sleep, of persecution and loneliness treated with Kafkaesque attention to detail – all have featured in the Irish-born Matthew Sweeney’s recent books, and Black Moon (Cape £9) is no exception. Early titles such as Naked, Captured and The Scream set the atmosphere. Simply Black, about an eclipse, appears to cap these frighteningly convincing fables with a message approaching despair, as does the title poem, about a cave-dwelling artist: “There were no people in [his] paintings, // which were found piled up on one another / inside the cave, with no sign of him, / and on top was a depiction of a black moon.” The poems that leave this vein of fantasy to explore, for example, the ambiguities involved in an exile’s return to Ireland (Coming Home, Borders), or Sweeney’s failed attempts to become an angler (The Fisherman), are needed. They prove that the poet’s success with nightmarish allegorical vignettes has not itself become a kind of trap.

Dennis O’Driscoll’s new volume is called Reality Check (Anvil £7.95). Part One includes the title poem, a disturbing sequence entitled Fifty O’Clock, jaunty evocations of Irish bread and butter and rain (All Over Ireland), and a painting of an Ulster landscape, intriguingly seen as “this postwar idyll”. Part Two is Skywriting, a long poem aiming to “paint a map of light in all its moods and modulations”. This seems a curious departure for a poet with O’Driscoll’s talent for capturing the absurdities of modern working life in Quality Time (1997) or for the darkly impressive personal poems of Weather Permitting (2000). In fact, there is an uncharacteristic flatness about this ambitious effort; although occasional ideas such as “late autumn light, bronze as beech leaves / . . . aggrandising my memos /. . . pensioning me off” find him recovering the rueful, satirical mode of his best verse.

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