POETRY:IN CLOSE QUARTERS (the Gallery Press, 78pp, €11.95), his fifth volume, Justin Quinn is said to turn his "careful gaze on Ireland, from the 1980s to the present". Although his primal scene of instruction may have been a classroom in south Co Dublin, however, Quinn remains transfixed by and obsessed with non-Irish cultures and contexts.

This, indeed, is one of the chief values of his poetry, because his poetic engagements with Irish culture, unlike the interventions of his critical writing, often lack the kind of insight one finds in poems such as Musílkovaor The Months, with its haunting images of "the rusting factories of Karlin and Zizkov" and "the delta as a mess of leaves / and feathers, scattered papers, thrums of nets". In the sixth section of The Monthswe are told that "Dave mentioned on the phone how June had hit him / with memories of the Leaving Cert", and this return to the realm of formal education, and the inability to escape it, is a recurring source of tension in Quinn's work. In Seminarthe speaker – a lecturer in American literature, like the author – loves "the way [his students] sit / and use their bodies to nuance what they say", and he has to "lean forward to catch the drift of it". In another poem, a father proudly carries his infant "daily to the crèche / along the path, our prince / or princess, full of beans". However, one yearns for Quinn to write poems that might be less obedient to their formal routes and ways of saying, for him to take a detour along the way signalled in poems such as First Spring Days,for example, or closer towards the true emotional centre of Close Quarters,which is to be found in poems such as Coupleand Divorce.Quinn is an exacting formalist, and there are times, in A Shrike,say, or Elegy,when his lyrics almost soar, but the burden of the schoolbag tends at times to weigh him down.

THE SAME MIGHT be said of Michael O'Loughlin, whose latest collection is presided over by figures such as Walter Benjamin and Antonio Machado. The middle section of In This Life(New Island, 53pp, €10.99) centres around the persona of one Mikelis Norgelis, "a fictional Latvian poet" and "an immigrant to Ireland".

This is a dangerous strategy, and it works in so far as it allows O'Loughlin to imagine how an immigrant might perceive contemporary Ireland's myths and messes. Where some of O'Loughlin/Norgelis's insights seem brutally apposite, in the details of A Latvian Poet Writes an Ode to Capitalism,for example, or A Latvian Poet Does the Joycean Pilgrimage,there are also places where the desire to critique is undone by imagery that seems purely gratuitous, turning Norgelis into the kind of macho freak the Canadian poet bpNichol famously derided as "Captain Poetry".

Indeed, the absurd machismo of some of the Norgelis poems is less in evidence in pieces on either side of the collection's central sequence, such as Messiah of Manhattanand The Widow's Prayers,as well as the book's wonderful opening poem , Elegy for a Basset Hound. Here O'Loughlin reveals a tenderness that tempers his engagements with history at the same time as it enhances his portrayals of the mundane. "I've read Freud, I've read Jung" the speaker says in The Widow's Prayers, "But there's nothing here to analyse". O'Loughlin is at his best when the intellectual scaffolding is abandoned and he focuses directly on what he calls "the darkness and unknowing before Creation" in the book's opening elegy. The idea may have been inspired by the poet's reading in the Kabbalah, but the poem's closing image of a lost dog raising its nose to "the fouled air" to locate his master is one of the most memorable in a book that tries perhaps a little too hard at times to survey the barbarous wastes of contemporary Irish and European history.

"IN WHATEVER COUNTRY you're in / crows are having a good time of it", writes Joseph Woods in one of the sections of Why do the wrong people travel,from Ocean Letters(Dedalus Press, 72pp, €11), his third collection. In another poem we are told that "Luis Piedra Buena had something of Kinnegad / or Athlone about it", while in a number of "bookshop poems" the poet describes the difficulty of not being able to find anything worthwhile in shops he has visited in Rangoon and Shimla, describing the "mechanics and hymnals" and "catalogues" he finds as "detritus of Empire". Although one might want to challenge the poet's dismissal of this "detritus", it is nonetheless refreshing to encounter in Ocean Letters poems that acknowledge the ultimate futility of formal book-learning in lines that question the nature of the self at home and abroad in language that is both candid and unaffected. Train through Finlandhas the durable simplicity of a poem by Robert Frost, even if it will always evoke the earlier master in its language and tone. Poems such as Handball Alleysand In Foreign Parksobserve the world and record it without being burdened down by what Samuel Beckett famously called "the loutishness of learning": "A couple embrace, sentried by a colossal / gate that no longer opens or shuts on anything". And that is that. Joseph Woods's poems, when they work, speak of inner exile as much as they record the experience of expatriation, and they do so in a way that can be disarming in their tonal control.

MACDARA WOODS'S first collection of poems appeared in 1970, and The Cotard Dimension (Dedalus Press, 90pp, €11.50) is his 11th book. " There is adolescence / And then there is / Adolescence"he writes in the prologue to this new book, and there are many poems here that ponder the difficulties of age, ageing and the frailty of the body, but do so with wit, courage, humour, and insight. In Work in Progress,for example, he writes:

Would you ever fuck off

I say to truth

Would youeverbegone

And fuck away off out of that

With yourself?

Woods’s fidelity to the spoken word is in evidence here, but these lines are also illustrative of the lightness of touch that characterises an aesthetic that is also capable of direct and uncompromising address. In formal terms Macdara Woods is and has been one of the most persistently inventive poets of the lyric mode writing English poetry in Ireland over the past 40 years, but he is also a poet whose work engages closely with what he has elsewhere called “Knowledge in the Blood”, lived experience, the real.

At times this knowledge is celebrated in poems of astonishing musical grace, as in Song (to be sung to the tune of " Dicey Reilly,slowly"); at others it comes through in Woods's reading in the notebooks of figures such as Jules Cotard, for example, whose name gives this book and one of its key poems their titles. "When I am alone / I speak to silence / And my aperçus go unrecorded –" he writes in Left-Handed Notes, a poem that ultimately celebrates the perseverance of the poet and his art against the "ticking bomb" of time.

Throughout this collection the strength of Macdara Woods's poetic voice rings true in lyrics that deserve a wider hearing. They too are "Too beautiful to leave" as the speaker says of the things of the world, "the sad detritus of bottle caps and memories", in the collection's closing poem ( In May the Park and Me Revisited). The projected publication of Woods's Collected Poemswill be a highlight in the poetry calendar for 2012.

Philip Coleman is a lecturer in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin. His book Reading Pearse Hutchinson,edited with Maria Johnston, was recently published by Irish Academic Press