At Poetry Now, there was humour, tragedy, and even a touch of magic, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

Poets deal in truths. They lure them, like so many silk ribbons, out of secret pockets, leaving the rest of us to shudder in recognition. Memory is enacted and made real. There is also an element of celebration and, when it comes to a public reading, performance. It was the celebratory which had engaged Brian Keenan when he came on stage to introduce a trio of poets at this year's International Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Keenan, who has experienced horrors worthy of Conrad, brought all the logic, wit and warmth of east Belfast to his reader's enthusiasm for the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Bill Manhire and the inspired and inspiring Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, whose work he talked about with the evangelical pleasure of discovery.

PN06 was rich in exuberance of performance and thought; it was a formal occasion marked by energy - perhaps drawing from the sea outside. Even the poets were having a good time. The organisers had set out to establish a mood of relaxed exchange. This was achieved with a series of sharp, intelligent introductions, pitched by speakers who knew what to say, and most importantly, when to stand back and allow the poets to take over.

This presented its own ironies. Dennis O'Driscoll, who matches Larkin in art and surpasses him for humour, was alert to it. Having been introduced by no less than a Nobel Literature Laureate, Seamus Heaney, O'Driscoll said that it was like Daniel O'Donnell being brought on stage by Luciano Pavarotti: "It's a reversal of the natural order of things."

Heaney, as ever, caught the exactness of the moment, and quoted Keats when describing O'Driscoll as "an intelligence that has become a soul" and praised his "high level of awareness".

By exploring the humour and tragedy of everyday life, O'Driscoll brings rigour, realism, occasional whimsy and consistent subtle candour to his work. He is also a shrewd, informed reader and gifted critic. "No one has a wider, more intimate knowledge of world poetry than he does," remarked Heaney, noting "the solitude and solidarity" of this "guardian of poetry".

When a writer is as interested in the work of others as O'Driscoll is, this essential curiosity heightens the artist's own work. He is both intelligence and intelligence officer, questing between the ordinary and the profound, writing his poems and informing us of the work of others. He read There Was, an evocative recently published long narrative poem based on his grandmother's house, a sanctum of his youth, addressed to his boyhood self.

The form is an exciting new direction for him. But the special moment was reserved for a poem in honour of a master whose spirit presided over the festival, the mighty Czeslaw Milosz.

Disarmingly, by way of preface, O'Driscoll told a story about Milosz - how the 1980 Nobel Literature laureate, who was born on the Polish-Lithuanian borderland of Wilno in 1911, had spent a life in exile.

The Lithuanian, who wrote in Polish because his social class had decreed it, finally went home. But after 52 years away, everything had changed. "He could recognise nothing." Nothing until he saw a field that he remembered.

"I searched for it, found it, recognised it," wrote Milosz in A Meadow. O'Driscoll never forgot the image of the old man searching for something that hadn't changed and then finding some comfort in a memory that endured.

His poem, Milosz's Return, published in the TLS the week after Milosz's death in late 2004, is both graceful elegy and celebration of a particular moment:

"The field your memory singled out for special treatment can be located by you still:

the one the sun would always make an extra fuss about, buff until it gleamed like a copper pan suspended in the oak- beamed kitchen of your manor house.

Retrace the well-worn path of memory. Nothing is beyond recovery. No one had died . . ."

The writing of the poem came naturally to O'Driscoll. "I had been thinking about him, he was in my mind, I knew he was dying. I had thought he was immortal. He had lived through so many eras, so many lives."

That unique voice of eastern Europe found continuity in the work of Adam Zagajewski who, as Thomas Kinsella, the natural heir to Yeats, looked to the self, located himself in following Milosz in the personal, not the public.

Zagajewski, who seems a lot happier than he looks, is conscious of translation as a barrier to poetry, and read in Polish and English. His genius lies in consummate comic timing. His grasp of the unknowable gives him immense understanding:

"Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form."

(Moment, from Tremor)

Like that of Milosz, also evoked by Heaney, the shadow of Joseph Brodsky hovered. Zagajewski read Elegy for Joseph Brodsky. For all the vain intelligence, Brodsky, according to Zagajewski, was also vulnerable. "There was the tiny pause in flawless arguments," he said, remarking that Brodsky was increasingly aware of the weakness of his damaged heart.

On the theme of language and translation, Zagajewski recalled how the Russian poet sang his poems to listeners who couldn't understand the words but responded to the poetry of the emotion. Anyone who ever attended a Brodsky reading was struck by the colour and force of Brodsky declaiming in Russian contrasted against the muted, almost sullen quality of the English version.

Zagajewski differs in this respect. His laconic tone undercuts all. This is the poet who wrote:

"The churches of France, more welcoming than its inns and its poems,

Standing in vines like great clusters of grapes, or meekly, on hilltops . . . Abandoned buildings, deserted barns . . .

But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass . . ."

(from The Churches of France for Czeslaw Milosz)

Within a couple of sentences, Zagajewski had established not only his voice, but that of the society, and the culture that had shaped him.

Franz Schubert: A Press Conference proved a good place to start the reading:

"Yes, my life was short, yes, I loved, felt a light growing, yes, under my fingers sparks were born. Yes, I had little time, I didn't know how much . . . I ran through icy forests, chased by snow, yellow stars, and by the strangeness of style itself; no, not the police, I don't know if it was a devil . . ."

The parody succeeds through the rhythms; Kafkaesque nuance is present through several of the poems. Although Zagajewski sidesteps the public, there is no mistaking his awareness of the atmosphere of menace: "You close a book it sounds like a gunshot" (from In The Encyclopaedias, No Room for Osip Mandelstam). In Poems on Poland he writes:

"I read poems on Poland written by foreign poets, Germans and Russians have not only guns, but also ink, pens, some heart, and a lot of imagination . . ."

He read from Self-Portrait, remarking "in case you don't know who I am". In it, he sums up his own life and also the lives of others:

"I live in strange cities and sometimes talk with strangers about matters strange to me . . .

I see three elements in music: weakness, power and pain.

The fourth has no name. I read poets, living and dead, who teach me

tenacity, faith and pride . . ."

The organisers of PN06 presented many gifts to the eager audiences, most notably the work of Zagajewski. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill had begun her reading with a wonderful body of Early Irish poems, evocative monologues. The translations achieved the mastery of Anglo-Saxon poems such as Wulf and Eadwacer.

She placed modern familiar concerns within the context of ancient Ireland. Literally taking her poems from the shopping bag she carried on stage, she deliberately created an atmosphere of convivial ease and then unleashed one of her finest poems, Mushrooms, a brilliantly sinister piece of surrealism that seared through all complacency.

New Zealander Bill Manhire blended the topical and the historic to rather formal effect in poems of bleak phrasing and brutal imagery which left one impressed but detached.

Performance was central to the delivery of both Yusef Komunyakaa whom, regrettably, I missed, and also to his fellow journalist/poet James Fenton who had obliged at the last minute to substitute for US poet Jean Valentine.

Fenton came on stage with the demeanour of a man about to impart weighty messages from afar. He prefaced his reading with a meandering anecdote about his adventures in Belfast as a journalist. From heroic foreign correspondent, he shifted guises to that of theatrical poet, evoking echoes of Coleridge fast-forwarded in time.

The festival opened with a keynote address on the artistic enigma that is Thomas Kinsella, inheritor of the Yeatsian mantle and mentor of John F Deane.

Patrick Crotty looked to the theme of place in Kinsella's work and explored the powerful emotional urgency of this most sophisticated and intense of Irish poets whose career now spans 50 years.

The elusiveness of his art and the exclusivity of his artistic manifesto continues to preoccupy readers. Here is personal experience catalogued with lyric precision and a magisterial sense of import. An element of further magic was supplied when a man in the audience announced, "I was there with him", in reference to a holiday undertaken in 1946, and immortalised in a Kinsella poem.

Poetry events can be judged on the audience response. The sight of so many readers running out into the night, eager with words and clutching newly purchased books, suggests that PN06 celebrated poetry and most of all, incited further investigations of the familiar and the new.