No matter how messy the grit you know there's a big shining pearl about to drop into your hand. Maybe this is one of the risks Levine speaks of, native to this sort of oceanic embrace. The shining eyes, the catch in the throat, the big American bear-hug is bestowed on everything from the heavily symbolic night-ferry to instant sex. the city he'd transformed into feeling": Boston and New York become Doty's Alexandrias, with Aids as a further aid to melancholy and meditation.If Doty has a fault, it is that the celebratory note is struck just a little too often and too easily. Buildings knocked down, waves breaking, sodium lights, advent calendars as ur-stories, Chet Baker's trumpet, drag queens in "black silk of esta noche" singing perfect blues, Cavafy's poems of "regret and desire .. memory's erotics, his ashen atmosphere ... There's a good deal of "imbricate" and "exfoliate" along the way but if you like gorgeous brocades, rich pastries, lofty echoes from the nave, this is the stuff to spend your piacular pence on.Mark Doty's My Alexandria (Cape pounds 7) is also a stunner, one which marries plain speaking to a long grammatical stride, "big, risky, fearless poems", as Philip Levine has said, "in which ordinary human experience becomes music". This last is a virtuoso self-portrait of the ambiguous feelings "Spooling through me like a Mobius strip" conjured by the "supposedly arousing" presence of a "uniformed woman":Betrayals, infidelities,Coercions, seductions, lies,Ready to confess them all, and more,As if in her firm indifference she'd regressed meInward down some atavistic lineTo the original essence, some masculineCriminal salt; a frieze of victimsPanelled in my own skullLike a lit cathedral hell ...A shudder, and then stillness;Avoidance of each other's eyesAs in some bedroom fiasco's wake,The air too brimful with disclosure, till the doorOpened and we parted, the clamped riftBetween us widening like a continental driftOf the sexes; she to the butcher, the breaker,The ripper, the rapist,I to my therapist.Lasdun has bags of wit and panache, not least in those baroque stanzas which are as at home with dregs and dreck as they are with "the coffered contours of a mind/Breached by infinity" (Borromini's overreaching architecture in Rome).

That will either have you weeping into your Palgrave or reaching for your atheistical blue pencil and a copy of Empson.James Lasdun's title, The Revenant (Cape pounds 7) also threatens poeticality, but his bejewelled style and complex stanzas are imbued with the necessary toughness for "Bag-Slashers in the Terminal Terrestre" and "Lime Pickle" (nastily sprung on him by a girlfriend's father) and "Woman Police Officer in Elevator". Flowers, birds, snow, fishes, whispers, haiku-like glimpses and intimations of immortality haunt these mostly short pieces in longish lines. They're all about blessings and surprises, as in the excellent love poem "The Scissors Ceremony", or "Chinese Occasions", which marries the quiet of Mahon's "Snow Party" to birds and breezes, those patient incessant tutors of "the culture vulture from Ulster". The title poems starts off like Heaney in fond paternal mood ("Added to its remaining sites will be the stanza/I compose...") and then calls up the plangently symbolic ghost orchid itself "Just touching the petals bruises them into darkness". Longley's Ghost Orchid (Cape pounds 7) carries on from where his last, Gorse Fires, left off, with the addition of some classical variations sparked off by Homer and a commission from Hofmann and Lasdun's recent book of Ovid make-overs. THE new Cape poetry list is impressively varied: Michael Longley, James Lasdun, Michael Doty are as different from one another as they could well be, the first a mole in the deep mines of lyric, the second a cosmopolitan who makes matter burst into elegant bubbles and bubbles themselves matter for a three-page cadenza, the third a plain-speaking, death-haunted American who finds "the shook heart of the paperweight" in every mundanity of modern life. No one who has absorbed its reverence for consolation, its steadfast attachment to possibility, will succumb quite so readily again to the seductions of Larkin's No..

The force of his book is as much spiritual as critical; there is a priestly glow beneath its intellectual sparkle. "Aubade" is accused, not for its loss of religious faith, but for its lack of faith in poetry's redress Heaney is a believer. saw in the cold and rook-delighting heaven"; Heaney notes, in contrast, how "when Larkin lifts his eyes from nature, what appears is a great absence". In such a dark night as Larkin's, W B Yeats looked up and "Suddenly ...

But finally, following (this time) Czeslaw Milosz, he objects to the poem's central proposition that "Death is no different whined at than withstood".One of the recurring ideas in this sequence of lectures is that poetry exists on the frontier between the world we know and "the domain of the imagined"; whatever the balance of its movements, its work is to go to and fro. Heaney proceeds to his position through a gracious appreciation of the poem's "heartbreaking truths and beauties"; he notes the reappearance in harrowed form of words like "unresting" and "afresh" from earlier poems by Larkin, less, perhaps, to stress the new hopelessness of "Aubade" than to allow that the poet has after all been more affirmative elsewhere. The lecture in which Heaney's convictions lead him closest to disapproval deals with Larkin's late poem "Aubade", that supremely bleak admission of the terror of being dead. Which you would not easily say, whatever his virtues, about Philip Larkin. 'This,' he said, 'is a minor point of major importance.' "Heaney concludes of Bishop, in perhaps the plainest statement of the principle behind these writings, that "she does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us to endure it". His own sense for the weight of the unconsidered magnifies their successes, and wittily, too: "I am reminded of a remark made once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document.

Heaney is in his element with poets as watchful (for all the apparent gulf in sophistication between them) as Clare and Bishop, whose "attention to detail" - Clare's "one-thing-after-anotherness", Bishop's engagement with the movement of a sandpiper's toes - "can come through into visionary understanding". Hence Hugh MacDiarmid's "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistles" figured as wresting artistic victory from the defeat of his political ideals, achieving "something equal to and corrective of the prevailing condition". "Poor" John Clare, whose loss amounted to nothing less than himself ("I am - yet what I am none cares or knows") is celebrated for his exemplary rejection of any official version of how poetry should behave; the measured enthrallment of Heaney's essay continues the reclamation of Clare, a task which has been accomplished - with respect to the editorial work of Geoffrey Summerfield and others - less by academic critics than by the impassioned advocacy of poets like Heaney and Tom Paulin.Elizabeth Bishop returns Heaney's close artistic sympathy by supplying him, in "One Art", with a perfect enactment of another, obsolete meaning of "redress"- "to set upright again":It's evidentthe art of losing isn't hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.Says Heaney, "The pun in that final nick-of-time imperative - 'Write it!' - is in deadly earnest .. the poem is asked to set the balance right". But as often in these pages, the generous precedence Heaney gives to the saying of another is soon overtaken by the subtlety, charm and humane force of his own formulations. By the "redress" of his title, he means one definition in particular: "Reparation of, satisfaction or compensation for, a wrong sustained, or the loss resulting from this." His subjects, broadly speaking, are thwarted individuals made good by poetry, those who have mastered, in Elizabeth Bishop's ironic phrase, "the art of losing". (For the same reason, he has avoided reviewing, except as an occasion for celebration: one who has felt Osip Mandelstam's "nostalgia for world culture" will not be inclined to local disparagement.) The keynote of the lectures is a remark borrowed from George Seferis's notebooks about poetry being "strong enough to help" - a considerable statement of faith disguised as a small claim. SEAMUS HEANEY's third volume of prose consists of 10 of the 15 lectures he gave over five years as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Yet because everything he has had to say in public about the poetry of others stems from his own deep convictions about the art he shares with them, it reads as a coherent single work of something more vital than we usually mean by criticism.