The canard that English poetry is insular and parochial is given the lie by the conjunction of these three fine, far-travelled and varied books. Stephen Romer has for many years taught in France, and is immersed in its literature; the German-born poet-translator Michael Hofmann grew up in England; and the Welsh-residing, English-born Matthew Francis imagines the entire world through the fantastical work of a medieval English traveller who may never have gone anywhere at all.

Romer's rich and ample fourth book, Yellow Studio (Carcanet £9.95), offers a sequence of elegies for his father as well as love poems, brushes with politics and a strain of comedy that may cheer up his fellow poet-professors: “The poets stumble out/with their incomprehensible produce./Now they must lay it down / for comparison and analysis/as the maples start to burn/and the freshman snivels.” Romer knows what he wants, something the world is inclined to forbid - unbroken absorption in the artistic vocation suggested by the Vuillard painting that gives the book its title, “that humane/heaven of drapes and turpentine”. But things are as they are, and in his love poems Romer manages a light touch, humour and an irremediable ache. His economy of means and his exact lyric simplicity are extremely unusual, and to be prized.

Matthew Francis's Mandeville (Faber £9.99) retells the alleged travels of the 14th-century author Sir John Mandeville, whose own existence is uncertain, though the outrageous and entertaining Travels has remained an important work of the period. In Francis's hands, written in stately but unsettling 13-syllable lines and tercets, the Travels becomes a manual of instruction for anyone foolish enough to venture abroad, a deadpan joke on the credulous (a knife dropped in the sea falls through the world and embeds itself in the sailor's wife's kitchen table) and, most interestingly, a practical study of the imagination's power to generate and repair itself: “You should know as you sail you can go no further/than the far side of a circle. But you should know too/that the world is deep, and that no return is certain.”

Francis explains that he has attempted to represent two simultaneous and contradictory world-views, whereby although the world was known to be round it was necessary to place Jerusalem at its centre. The resonances of this not-unfamiliar state of affairs are allowed to emerge naturally through the measured yet outrageous utterances of Mandeville, who is always careful to provide himself with what Auden called “a cave with two exits”. At the end, we learn of Paradise that “There is a wall around it”, but Mandeville regretfully adds: “I have never been there,/which I regret, for it is said to be beautiful./We must sail on. We are almost at the beginning.” In its grandeur and strangeness, Mandeville prompts comparisons with Calvino.

The early work of Michael Hofmann is more abrasive than his cosmopolitan affiliates James Lasdun, Jamie McKendrick and Romer. In Selected Poems (Faber £12.99), his reading, at 20 years' distance, of the psyche and cityscape of what was once called “late capitalism” seems deadly accurate, jagged as a Kirchner painting of the Weimar period, struggling to relate the personal to a larger context: “I have no perspective on the dotty winter clouds,//the pubic scrub of this street I am learning to hate,/with its burglar alarms and sleeping policemen.”

His poem-biographies of Crassus and Marvin Gaye are true originals, in line of descent from his master, Robert Lowell, and the slightly less unbending recent work indicates, hearteningly, a poet unafraid of change or chance.

Yellow Studio by Stephen Romer
Carcanet £9.95
Mandeville by Matthew Francis
Faber £9.99
Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann
Faber £12.99

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