Although he can claim his place as one of a trio of the most senior and eminent living Australian poets, Chris Wallace-Crabbe attracts fewer admiring readers in Britain than the other two, Les Murray and Peter Porter. To each of his two compatriots he addresses, in Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet £9.95), a comradely poem that hints that he is perfectly happy to be another kind of writer, and very much his own man. To Murray, a notably exuberant artist, he poses the question “How do you write about the condition/ of joy?” With Porter, a poet of erudite seriouness and occasionally a grand manner, he lightly proposes “that work may be identical with play”.

In this new collection, as before, Wallace-Crabbe mixes his own kind of reserved joyfulness about the natural world - as in Along the Bough (“it is a kind of heat-furred epilogue to wistfulness/when all the lamplike apricots/...have fallen plump away”) - with rueful conclusions about modern mankind: “We were bound to applaud/two empty signifiers now: security and terror.” This is poetry of fine technical resource, precise observation and sly wit.

The same straightforward, no-nonsense quality that informs Wallace-Crabbe's work also features prominently in Maureen Duffy's Family Values (Enitharmon £8.95). An Australian poet quotes his dad's advice: “Treat him with the ignore he deserves”, and in the title poem a south Londoner with an Irish father (whose departure before she was born is poignantly described in Paternity) remembers being told as a child, “It'll never get better if you pick it”, and “Never say die till you're dead.”

Duffy began as a poet (her several earlier volumes include a collected edition), became a ground-breaking feminist novelist, has worked tirelessly for the rights of fellow authors, and now (where did she find time?) offers this spirited return to verse. Vividly recalled people, places and, in particular, objects that featured in her childhood - the soda jar, the cutting-out scissors, a “bosomy chest of drawers” - provide the most compelling poems here (the themes of myth and travel less so). But the nostalgia can be chasteningly painful: “the gut lurches again with loss/even after half a lifetime”. And she ends reluctantly believing that “mortality's at best a dodgy state”. For all that, Duffy's latest verse, despite the occasional lapse into mere excellent prose, is her best, strangely positive and life-affirming through the satisfying sureness of its detail.

Colette Bryce requires a similar response to detail from the reader, but the rewards are altogether different. Self-Portrait in the Dark (Picador £8.99) amply fulfils the promise of earlier books that suggested a distinct talent for eerie precision in catching moments of everyday banality: going through a car wash, phoning someone in a supermarket (in Where Are You?), or just drinking an espresso. She can, though, capture more disturbing and haunting experiences: a night in a mediocre hotel (“the familiar airlessness,/a planet's televisual detritus”), or a visit by Twelve (the title, so is this a jury?) to a place where something ominous has happened: “I focused on the guide/ in front, burrs clinging//to his coat. And then the spot. The remnants of a cordon/were fluttering in a light breeze. ‘Feel free...'” A frightening power can lurk under the delicate organisation of these often astonishing new poems.

In Drives (Cape £9), her second book (These Days won the Forward Best First Collection prize in 2004), Leontia Flynn attempts boldly, if curiously, to fix in short poems the spirit of a place such as her own Belfast, or Berlin or New York, or the essence of various powerful creative personalities, among them Proust, Beckett and Dorothy Parker. She runs the obvious risk of failing to devise enough ingenious judgments, just or unjust, in a very few lines; though Alfred Hitchcock's fear of a cop locking him into “the dark where his terrified cries,/unheard or unheeded, are the cries of a blubbery child” is worth a thought. But on the evidence of this collection, the more extended, more personally committed poems such as Drive and Our Fathers seem a much better option.

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