“The servants were kept out of sight … A sunken road excluded them from views through the big windows.” Frank Ormsby’s powerful, austere The Tumbling Paddy (Bloodaxe, £12.99) begins in darkness, with the sequence Florence Court and the Marble Arch Caves. Florence Court was designed to keep servants out of sight, “So their lives went underground, or their voices became,/for centuries, a trickle in high-ceilinged rooms,/their faces pools of absence.” These concealed servants are a formidable metaphor for the dark riches of the hidden limestone cave formations, “I stand by the Wet Entrance and seek to sound/the natterer bat’s sonar needle, the scarcely audible flick/of the brown trout, and the herald moth’s ghostly shimmer.” (Echoes) Sound is at a premium here – it wells up in the local placenames and haunting history, particularly in the arresting title poem which describes the workings of the drawn rake used for breaking up the soil while doubling as an ars poetica or perhaps a description of memory itself. Its zigzag line-endings hold an astonishing amount of alliteration and subtle rhymes, yet it never cloys as it moves like its namesake, “In its blunderings after lumpy clay/it is gobbledygook in motion,/a hop-along hauled by a tractor./It never misses/an angle …” It is a perfect reminder of Don Paterson’s definition of a poem as “a little machine for remembering itself”. Here nature can dazzle even in the dark but especially in the heartbreaking poems about Juggy, one of two learning-disabled women shockingly incorporated into the earl’s romanticised 18th-century landscape, he “had a notion/to carve a room for us/from an oak tree near his cottage … We delight the visitors who peer/around our curtained doorway …” (Nora and Juggy). Ormsby’s tremendous poems loom out of darkness, shot with stars, lit with sound so that when they move to the final Spartan sequence, Autumn Burials, that music and precision is a profound comfort. Nessa O’Mahony’s Dodder Daughter (Salmon, €14) flows between the poles of abundance and loss – beginning with her mother’s dementia and her own recovery from major surgery, before flowing into her personification of the Dodder river as it mirrors ever-changing familial relationships. Tributaries rise, “just a trickle of wet silt/that makes gravity greater” (Never were there more devoted sisters) before flowing down to swell the volume of the Dodder as it enters the river Liffey. This central section is rich with movement, its list-poem Flora and Fauna a song of praise to the vibrant wildlife while the charming Froglets outlines young frogs crossing the road at the Bohernabreena Reservoir, “the road seems to move itself/stone by stone from the green-painted gate/to the bridge … each pebble shapes/into perfectly scaled miniatures/olive green, hopping … their slanted route to the water.” O’Mahony’s understated precision is her strength, as when she observes The Hares of Dohilla on Valentia Island, “On the last night,/when the moon rose,/dusk gathered earth to air/and the midges curtained the glass./The hares came, reasserting rights/to the gateway, the pavement, our threshold.” Or the unconsecrated burial ground in Cillín, “Where nothing grazes,/not even the hares/ run through it.” This brevity is especially potent in the poems about her mother’s dementia, shot through with humour, “We’ve grappled these last weeks/with more than pills and stockings.” (Compression)When the doctor tells her mother that “I’m your memory”, O’Mahony’s response is “if so, we’re already sunk.” Even so, humour is no match for the eerie and relentlessly tight Charging Down, “My mother is switching off … switch by switch,/appliance by household tool … Write any signs you want … You’ll wake to a cold house … the digital clock blank … she’s sending back to earth/the current that charged her.”Lily Blacksell’s Life Immediately (Bloodaxe, £12.99) is a true original, fizzing with quotable lines, “bad guys don’t have the facts but they sure know the feelings … that is the edge that they have on the Left.” (Will I Ever) Blacksell is a master at expressing those slippery feelings, “I don’t want to cause any more pain I said (shouted)/with a gesture intended to be graceful and gentle//but my Chanel nail varnish leaves streaks like stigmata/thinly sliced tomato, papercut galore”. Descriptions have the delicious shock of the newly minted, a boy’s face “poking out of his hood like a personified foghorn” in Hand Claps or a coffee cup likened to an upturned cradled hoof in Frog. Song lyrics take off in the unexpected ways. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye summons Leonard Cohen’s regretful adieu but dives into the discomfort of working with hay. A pony called Rabbit is “half-crazy” with a hay husk in his eye as “Paddy”, the terrier wants to play, and Blacksell tussles with the twine which causes her knuckles to “split and roam in my skin/with the seeds that have burrowed right under there”.Lily Blacksell: Life Immediately is fizzing with quotable lines. Photograph: Jake Kelsall Feelings shift constantly, Blacksell’s expert U-turns administering funny, satisfying shocks, “the farmer appears shouts surprise at all I’ve done. His swear words/grateful/proud/husky”. One Day, Maybe Next Week finds our poet at a party which is both fresh and familiar, “you will decide you will go, why the hell not … No one//has mentioned your new top,/pigeon-front purple, never mind.” This screwball narrator might spill the coffee (“it didn’t take long, did it,/to get to a bull in a china shop”) but she nails her lines to the rueful feelings with aplomb, “the … sadness … the one rarely talked about,/is that the bull, one way, another way,/is trying to get out.”Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s Milk Wood Memoir (Picador, £12.99) is set in her hometown, New Quay, the basis for Dylan Thomas’s Llareggub in Under Milk Wood. Wynne-Rhydderch’s dramatis personae features several of her relations and, like real people, they are particular and delightfully strange. “Violet said to Evan the Death … she wanted to have something to remember her father by … she asked to keep his leg. She had a souvenir of everything else … a plank from her uncle’s rowboat … the arm off her grandmother’s chair; then she’d taken the door off the cuckoo clock …” Wynne-Rhydderch’s New Quay is deep and local, with a very strong sense of the peculiar. Miner’s Fortnight poignantly describes the holidaying minors who preferred sleeping “on the quay every night to shake//the sediment of a thousand-year-old forest/from their lungs … These men who’d breathe/coal dust from dawn to dusk would//settle down along the slabs like a human seam./It wasn’t the stone that kept them there, but the air.” Metamorphoses streams through from the beginning, “And was it one of the owls who shed his feathers/to quills and morphed into Lady Charlhoote//who spent ten years re-folking all our tales for us?” (Aubade) – and it is the moving trees which are the most commanding characters here, “Later they thought it looked like a bantamweight boxer//who’d gone two rounds with the wind, holding aloft an invisible belt.” (Tree in the Shape of the Letter E). As the coastal erosion at New Quay gathers pace, Wynne-Rhydderch’s inimitable eco-elegies manage to cut a dance which is as delightful as it is seriously urgent, “… they’re just two tree trunks flunking/off the others stay/for now. The drowned forest is our credo in Wales,/whose leaves weep from harps … the strange pain that reveals itself at low tide/in stumps of a landscape that has died.” (Floating Forest) Martina Evans’s latest book is Drunken Driving (Carcanet)