O my friends, ever thirsting for knowledge,

I pity you, resting at your dachas,

your Irish cottages, or in Korcula,

turning your backs on the sea

and switching your brains off, placidly.

Onward, and may your torch never go out

During the ping-pong match! I bless you.

So ends Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Research Council, one of the many satirical bulls eyes from his great book The Sinking of the Titanic, originally published in 1978 and now republished along with nearly 400 pages of his six-decade writing life in New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £15).

That stanza’s tones are typical: pastiche of grand poetic address (“O my friends”), world-weary authority and satirical, disenchanting nods to modern society.

Here, and throughout this book, readers might feel that Enzensberger (who is one of his own chief translators into English, alongside Michael Hamburger), is the chief inheritor of WH Auden’s role as worldly, world poet.

Like Auden, Enzensberger has been as prolific an essayist and public intellectual as poet, and perhaps it is this which has led him into a mode where the lyric is tempered by an awareness of the social aspect of his work, as when Notice of Loss begins:

“To lose your hair, to lose your temper,

if you see what I mean, your precious time,

to fight a losing battle,

losing height and lustre, sorry,

never mind, to lose on points,

let me bloody well finish,

to lose blood, father and mother,

to lose your heart, lost long ago

in Heidelberg, all over again.”

The satirical or social element of his poetry is tempered by a sense that he, too, is implicated in the collectives he critiques:

“The bridge over there was completely destroyed.

Here the well-to-do poets take their tea

grumbling softly,

and there the new Hilton is going up

On this rickety park-bench

an old man can sometimes be seen

who sometimes tells the truth.

He did not show up today. (Sightseeing Tour)

The book ends with a magnificent long sequence, A History of Clouds, first published in Germany in 2003, whose subject is wonder. "They are above mistakes./ No one will be quick to claim/ that one of them is misshapen."

Enzensberger dedicates the book to translators, “the noble coolies of poetry” as he calls them, but occasionally, the English Enzensberger slips down a little too quickly: clear, easily understood and sometimes as easily forgotten, some of the translated poems lack the grip and density, the patterning and thinginess we want from poems alongside clarity, intelligence and feeling.

The same cannot be said of Antonella Anedda's Archipelago (Bloodaxe, £12) whose translator, Jamie McKendrick's detailed, even fussy attention to line, sound and pattern pay off in a salutary introduction to this Italian poet. Born in Rome in 1958, but with a Sardinian background which features in her recent work, Anedda combines vivid precision, a striking ability to conjure atmospheres and a mortal thinkiness.

McKendrick’s introduction suggests that she exists at an angle to the Italian lyric tradition and her earliest poems do refer more to St Petersburg than Rome.

“An Oriental night has fallen. It has stuck to the roofs.

Suddenly as in nativity scenes

from a crack in the sky snow fell.

Reindeer filed silently past the bedside.

Lappish fires flamed against the wooden wardrobes.

Outside branches and bottles cracked.

Christmas trees burned:

wood and glass, the secret gleam of

wrapping paper." (Winter Residencies)

Nights of Western Peace imagines contemporary Europe as the site of a truce whose price may not be worth paying:

“To discover the reason for a verb

because truly it isn’t yet time

and we don’t know whether to rush towards it or take flight.

Make evening come as though in

December

Over the tea-chests on the brink of

removal.

Give form to darkness

while the food flames up against the wall.”

Here and throughout, we seem to overhear in the scenes she describes, "A resonance in footsteps on paving stones,/ in voices." (Morning Silence)

McKendrick does not, or cannot, quite follow Anedda into more recent experiments in ekphrasis and in Sardinian dialect, but we still receive more than an inkling of that work's tough spruceness in the domestic estrangement of Kitchen:

“If he had seen her

seen her mortal form tonight

open the fridge door wide

almost bundle her body into it

into that nave of brightness

dumbly drinking milk

as spirits drink blood

ghostlike even to herself

athirst for white and dazzled by

the glare of steel and iron

her fingers burnt by ice

he would have said it wasn’t her. Not

the one whom dying I left

so she could live on in my place.”

Mark Doty is still probably best known for his TS Eliot prize winning collection My Alexandria (1993) and its successor Atlantis (1995), which elegiacally described the arrival of Aids into the American gay community. Talky, descriptive and autobiographical, Doty's ruminative poems often seem as if they are trawling through his environment for subjects which will, somehow, activate the poetic enzyme, something which happens on at least a few occasions in Deep Lane (Cape, £10).

Driving across George Washington Bridge with his ex, Doty finds a way into describing why they divorced: "He enjoys the mystery of contradiction, likes being lifted up, while I think the highest level of the bridge is terrifying: I act as though I am brave, because/ I understand that it's beautiful up here . . . he's happy, while I drive the appalling,/ crowded lane, and he looks out over the edges,/ humming a little, entirely pleased." (Immanence)

As he describes crystal meth, or his discovery of a new barber, readers can feel Doty straining to do more with the material, but in the book's longest poem King of Fire Island, he suddenly achieves lift-off. Its meditation on the self at a moment of both change and continuity is occasioned by his encounter with a buck deer whose "front leg merely tapered/ to a whisper, like the torso/ of a cartoon ghost".

John McAuliffe's fourth collection The Way In is published by the Gallery Press