POETRY: Encountering Zoe: New and Selected PoetryBy Tom MacIntyre, New Island, 200pp. €12.99
The Fullness of Time: New and Selected PoemsBy Gerard Smyth,  Dedalus, 198pp. €25 hbk, €16 pbk

WE SHOULDN'T judge a book by its cover, but titles, especially for milestones as significant as New and Selected Poems, do give the flavour of a writer's project. Tom MacIntyre, a playwright and fiction writer as well as a poet, has chosen not the new sonnet sequence that makes up more than half his book but Encountering Zoe, a narrative or half-narrative from 2006, as his title poem. Twenty years younger but offering an equally substantial volume, the poet-editor Gerard Smyth names both book and new poems for the haunting retrospect-prospect that he places, like an epigraph, at the opening of The Fullness of Time.

Each volume offers a healthy proportion of new work as well as the selected poems that contextualise it. This reassuring sign of poetic vitality is our proof that these are not purely publishingbut also creativeprojects. This makes particular artistic sense for MacIntyre. Because his new poems are dominated by the sonnet (there are just nine new poems in other forms), a form that we can easily hear as "English", it would be easy to overlook the unique grammatical shape-shifting that characterises his writing, and that is most audible in his fine versions from the Irish. Three of these "poetic translations" are all this volume keeps from MacIntyre's 1972 collection, Blood Relations. What in those early versions mimics the structure of the original – not building an argument but accumulating epithets in that older, lyric tradition – by the time of the newly published version of the anonymous 19th-century verse Maggie Barrfluently evokes the one-thing-leads-to-another of an attempted seduction: "Fell asleep she did, happily the wind / played with singing Maggie's untied hair".

This happy, flexible diction spills over into the original work collected here. Poems such as The Carpenter's Daughterand Widdadraw on the tropes of folklore and folksong, while others, such as Eagle, are both evocative and mysterious. The most striking of the new writing, though, is Sonnet Sequence – The Final Mother-fuck (Perhaps). Once again a title gives some of the game away: this is high late fury, in which formal constraints sometimes dim but often deepen an impression of highly wrought intensity: "heron, / Christ-bird, with spear, how may we learn?" (Ould Segotias); "You gaze, locked in neural din of the flesh, / quietus" ( The Mask). Few escape this fierce interrogation; even the great "Marina Tsvetayeva, dancing ex / cathedraher bebop and only vein" seems despite the historic tragedies of her life not quite to have MacIntyre's respect.

Gerard Smyth's diction and perspective are both, by contrast, lucidly open. Part of this openness lies in Smyth's ability to avoid hectoring. In early work such as Childhood House, as in the new poem One Evening After Songs of Praise, the precisely telling detail is shown, and left to hang, while the poem gracefully delineates, but never states, its conclusion:

Out of the dusk-fragrance, the eerie calm,

a voice called the names of children lingering

in one last game of catch-me-if-you-can.

Although the later poems tend to make their stakes more explicit – addressing friends living or dead, name-checking George Herbert, Mandelstam and Trakl, even advancing doctrinal arguments (in Blue Crucifixionfor example) – they retain this lightness of touch, and the sense of anti-didactic dignity that goes with it, to deep effect. The allusions and dedications have the feel of a conversation, carried on over "the fullness of time", both with others and the self.

For example, in another of the new poems, " Late in lifewe come back to the waves at Achill / to hear again the sounds they made / on our first nights of marriage" (Late in Life). This is a feat of artistic integration any poet would be proud of, yet quiet, uncluttered diction and a gifted ear (those perfectly judged line breaks) make it seem as "natural" as common sense. Elsewhere, among a generous number of selected poems, a school poem whose title, Finger-Writing on Window Dust,itself beautifully metaphorises the act of memory, ends "Out in the yard / it was knuckle-bone to knuckle-bone" – and leaves the reader to supply the conclusion, "as in life". Smyth has a great way with endings, and that deft, wise turn is the rule in this fine book, about which my only quibble might be that I'd have liked to know which books poems are republished from. More important, though, is the way it reveals an exceptionally coherent voice, marked, perhaps, by a certain deepening of tone that promises equal pleasures to come.

Fiona Sampson's new collection, Rough Music, has just been published by Carcanet