Dermot Bolger: his first collection in four years is full of clear-sightedness and honesty

Poetry has been experiencing its very own recession in recent years, one that has not only seen sales dip but also an unfortunate ghettoising of the form. Fortunately, there are still people out there willing to champion its cause. In Ireland, publishers like Gallery Press and Pat Boran's Dedalus Press are keeping the flag flying, and there are plenty of poets out there in recent months who have ploughed a lonely but productive furrow.

Tolstoy in Love (Dedalus Press) is Tyrone man Ray Givans' first full-length volume of poetry. Its first section is full of the energetic voice of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. It's vibrant, celebratory and, in moments like the poem 'Concubine', wonderfully sensual. The second section deals with Givans' autobiographical reminiscences of a Protestant boyhood in Belfast. It owes a lot to the influence of Wallace Stevens and John Berryman, and in one startling instance even has an ee cummings-inspired detour in the poem 'P.T.S.D'.

When future generations want to know what the Dublin of the 20th and 21st century was truly like, then they can turn to the works of Dermot Bolger. External Affairs (New Island), his first collection of poetry in four years, is full of his typical clear-sightedness and honesty. Bolger takes places like Old Bawn and Home Farm Road, and unearths from them the mythic and transcendent with language that is unequivocal and powerful. Only he could write about Jesus walking through Clondalkin and make it seem real, vital and important.

Read this in conjunction with its companion piece, Night and Day (New Island), an anthology of poems devised in partnership with South Dublin County Council. For anyone who wants to get to know the hidden heart of Dublin, it's a must.

West Cork native Leanne O'Sullivan writes about the figure of Hag of Beara in her collection Cailleach (Bloodaxe Books). It's an assured debut wreathed in water and mist, and earthed in the soil of a landscape she describes with deftness and vitality. This is a collection that feels lyrical, natural and unforced, marking O'Sullivan out as one to watch for the future.

English nature poet Mark Roper derives his inspiration from the Kilkenny countryside, where he now lives. Even So: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press) collects some of the best of his work. In poems both delicate and muscular, he focuses on landscapes quivering just on the brink between life and decay. You always get the sense that something darker is just over the horizon and this awareness heightens the beauty of his poems. One called 'Angel' tells the story of a boy hiding an angel from a world where such beings are no longer welcome. It's a lovely study in the tension between the urge for innocence and a world blighted by suspicion.

Mary Montague is a poet with a background in zoology and genetics, which helps inform her work in Tribe (Dedalus Press). These are densely-packed poems with a striking degree of concentration, and an almost scientific urge to catalogue images and sensations. She's a nature poet with the kind of vivid intensity that would have made Wordsworth quake in his boots. This is a rewarding collection jam-packed with memorable images, and infused with a strong sense of our moral responsibility towards nature.

Less intense, but just as arresting in its own way, is Peggy O'Brien's Frog Spotting (Dedalus Press). Here are poems of a quiet elegance that examine the natural world in a soft and almost grateful manner. 'Feather, Rocks and Bones' is an account of what O'Brien has gathered on her "necessary walks through owl deranged forests", and it ends with a heart-stopping moment of parental feeling, triggered by the sight of a "foetal feather still albumen glued" to the inside of a shattered egg. O'Brien knows how to invest her poems not just with grace, but with an undercurrent of real power.

Ciaran Carson's trademark lack of pretension runs through his Collected Poems (Gallery Press), confirming his status as perhaps the most unaffected poet of his generation. It's a volume that was published to mark Carson's 60th birthday, and provides a perfect introduction to a poet with an admirably varied sense of vision.

This reviewer was once scarred for life by an afternoon spent reading Seamus Heaney's turgid Station Island, but the man still has his fans. We prefer to stick with Al Alvarez's view on the occasion of Heaney winning his Nobel: "He's very, very good, but relatively small-scale." If you must get your fix of Heaney, then seek out RTé's recent CD box set of his oeuvre, Seamus Heaney: Selected Poems, which contains the complete works read by the man himself.

Heaney naysayers will still perhaps point to the uncrowned king of Irish poetry, Derek Mahon. His most recent collection, Life on Earth (Gallery Press), while not scaling the magnificent heights of his greatest work, still manages to impress with its subtle craftsmanship and intellectual rigour. It celebrates the work of Brian Moore and Chekhov, and even contains 'An Ode to Bjork' with her voice which "calls to the great waste beyond". We'll start taking Heaney seriously when he writes his ode to Eminem, but until then, Mahon is our man.