Keats lives, declares the title of Moya Cannon's new book. Our present moment, her poems seem to argue, is fleeting by comparison with, say, lines by Keats, or a fragment of pottery, or a cave drawing. Cannon's calm authority offers proof after proof of the responsibilities attendant on an art that knows Ars longa, vita brevis.

Line by line, Keats Lives (Carcanet, £9.99) is engagingly thoughtful and precise and, because Cannon never over-eggs the lines, there is real force when, in a poem such as Fly-Catcher, she ratchets up her description of how a bird "flew south, / balancing her tiny, tattered body / down through Mexico / all the way to South America / and back to the same Philadelphia hedgerow // to draw breath among cat-birds and orioles" to a closing couplet such as: "Life can be so rough, / yet we can't get enough of it."

Cannon's long view is always alert to what has survived, through millennia in the case of Burial, Ardeche 20,000 BC. In this poem, excavated grave goods allow her to reimagine gestures and figures she suddenly brings to life:

Someone sprinkled his grave with red

ochre,

someone tied a seashell around his neck,

someone placed a few flint blades by his

side,

and under his head someone laid

the dried tail of a fox, perhaps

a white fox.

Cannon does not shy away from Walter Benjamin's thesis that "There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" and Kilcolman reminds us "How hard, even still, to love the well-turned verse, / whose felicities were turned on such a lathe."

Niall MacMonagle's beautifully produced anthology Windharp (Penguin, £20) gathers 180 poems written since 1916 (including one by this reviewer), ending with a new poem by Cannon, The Countermanding Order, 1916, which was first published in The Irish Times this summer.

Beginning as he does with The Wayfarer, the poem Pádraig Pearse wrote on the eve of his execution, and ending in the relieved household of Cannon's Volunteer grandfather, MacMonagle's focus is on poems that register historical and biographical occasions.

MacMonagle's emphasis suggests that he regards Easter 1916 as the archetypal Irish poem and Yeats, predictably, dominates the book's first half, but MacMonagle also pieces together a more various account of the early 20th century than any previous anthology of this scale: Dora Sigerson, Eva Gore-Booth, Katharine Tynan and others join Yeats, Austin Clarke and Louis MacNeice on the contents page.

Poems from Patrick Kavanagh's great collection Come Dance with Kitty Stobling signal a new aesthetic and herald the generation who began to publish in the 1960s: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, Eavan Boland and others who now seem as much part of the established order as their predecessors.

This is an appealing and appetite-whetting introduction to a century’s poetry and, as he approaches the present day, MacMonagle spreads his net widely: there will be discoveries in his pages for every reader. And arguments! But then who can say which poets, yet alone which poems, from recent decades will survive their occasion?

Omission

MacMonagle’s picture of 21st-century Irish poetry is generous, but one surprising omission is Justin Quinn; whose work’s aesthetic – ironic, historical, lyrical – chimes with MacMonagle’s. Quinn published

Mount Merrion

, an engaging state-of-the-nation novel, in 2013, and his new poetry collection, Early House (Gallery Press, €11.95 paperback, €18.50 hardback), returns to the allusive formalism his readers will be familiar with.

Quinn's work is often occasional, taking initial bearings from a particular moment before re-setting them and stitching them to pressing larger issues. Across the 18 six-line stanzas of Letter, Including Bears, the Prague-based Quinn presents a self-portrait at a time when Russian nationalism simmered: "Irish. Letter-writer. / Living in Central Europe (where it's no-go / for Emperor, Commissar and Gauleiter / these last few decades). Basically, driftwood."

The poems’ other defining feature is their attachment to regular stanzas and iambic rhythms, which bear the weight, adeptly, of his historical speculations.

In the first third of Early House, however, Quinn drifts away from public places and themes, and the poems' formal choices and sometimes wilful diction can seem ostentatiously over-determined, as when he rhymes "woman" with "come in" (Astray) or, impossibly, "bathyscaphe" and "phonograph" (Villa).

Quinn is nothing if not self-aware about this, and colloquialisms jimmy the more abstract and traditionally poetic registers into his iambic lines: "Because each year in May / the new young people are in love / that makes it all ok? // Whatever. All I have's an air / that's got a good refrain" (Here Comes the Rain).

But his sensibility and aesthetic have more at stake elsewhere, when the speaker shifts perspective across carefully squared away stanzas. A new tone enters, often in sweepingly rhapsodic statements: the roadside desolation at the centre of Median shows Quinn's gift for registering contemporary atmospheres: "Beyond the lightly captured islands, / there's nothing, not a glint, and save / the roaring highway, silence / like a vast stalled wave."

And there's something wonderful about how far he travels in a Dublin poem, such as Claude Monet: Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat (1874), from its opening lines – "Where I grew up the concrete and the brick / boxed off small bits of grass and never changed. / It seemed that everything had been arranged / a hundred years ago and left to tick" – to its revelatory closing image:

I’d take a bus to town. The rooms were

silent

and full of other strangers. Though still a

boy

I’d look at this a half an hour, my gaze –

like that of earlier thousands on this

island,

and France before, starting in

Argenteuil –

with all those yellows, golds and reds

ablaze.

John McAuliffe's fourth book,The Way In, is published by Gallery Press. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester