When a poem declares “The truth is that all or none of this is true” (You distance yourself from the truth), you know not to trust the illusion of either sincerity or transparency. It’s a lesson worth remembering for all poetry but some collections seem to thrive more than others on the premise of their own aesthetic artifice.

Not that Bebe Ashley’s Harbour Doubts (Banshee, €12) is insincere, far from it, but it does question, in both playful and earnest modes, the value of apparent honesty.

A second collection that is inventive, joyful and unlike any other Irish poetry collection you’re likely to read this year, Harbour Doubts is both fiercely alive to its moment and also artfully bent on penetrating the noise of contemporaneity, often to do with language – its bullying definitions or mis-prompts.

Partly to evade them, the author learns British Sign Language (“I start speaking ambidextrously” – Sue Thomas FB Eye), co-opting her full body into a language expressed as visual cue. This leads to some good jokes (in woefully short supply in Irish poetry?), such as the poem titles My Voice Sounds English But Looks Northern Irish, or I Have A Set Of Flashcards for Feelings And Emotions, and to some punchy poems that write themselves into the distance between surface and substantial significance (“I walk alone through the park. I see a Dalmatian and I think: / that would look good in my living room”).

Occasionally, a dark undertow shadows the poems, underlining the emotional risk of themes of loneliness and longing. Urbane, sparky and adventurous, this is a collection that makes something deceptively off-hand of even its own procedures, as in Let’s Sign Science, which concludes:

Something is missing but these are all the words I have.

I arrange the language and it falls flat on the page.

Paul Farley, though of a generation that came to prominence back in the 1980s, seems a poet Bebe Ashley would like, and vice versa. When It Rained for a Million Years (Picador, £12), his sixth collection, exhibits enough similar self-deprecating, laconic wit, coupled with fidelity to place (in Ashley’s case, Northern Ireland; in Farley’s, Liverpool) to suggest common ground.

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Both poets also share an interest in the twists, occlusions and occasional dead ends of language, but Farley, more of a formalist than Ashley, is more committed to lyric grace and musicality. His poems have elegance, a way of turning into a conclusion that both clinches and amplifies what comes before, as in the final two lines of Memories of Midhope Street:

I was still in my twenties. I thought I’d ran my race.

An Apple Mac IIsi. The thrill of changing the typeface.

Farley is a great poet of memory, harnessing just the right degree of circumstantial detail to bring a subject to full-on, vivid life (“Whitethorn smells like sex in sleeping bags ... / The tarp applauds like mad in summer hail” – Tinned Peaches, Part 2). He works metaphor and simile to yield the kind of visual accuracy that’s also great fun to read, as with tumbleweed, for example, being described as “a dandelion clock / that emigrated, did well, grew huge, blew back / a legend of the screen” (Tumbleweed).

Though the tricksiness is neither concealed nor exaggerated for effect (see if you can spot the clever acrostic poem), there’s also a poignancy to this collection as it considers time shifts with their attendant losses. Night Class is a beautiful elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy and, in Three Rings, the poet recalls a family tradition which, in its small kindness, offers a check to the bigger fears of simply being alive:

... I let it ring three times

when drink-dialling our old house

to let my parents know I’ve arrived

and they can stop worrying now:

Moya Cannon’s Bunting’s Honey (Carcanet, £11.99) features a description of hawthorn (“ … hawthorn shakes out / its white blossom / to frill the small fields”), which suggests a very different approach to Farley’s.

These poems take their sincerity as a given: they are rapturous, melancholic, dismayed or angry just as they declare themselves to be and, if this occasionally comes across as a kind of innocent artlessness, readers seeking relief from wily postmodernism (or post-postmodernism?) will likely relish this.

The sensibility is unapologetically Irish Romantic, as the natural world and landscape frame the work and its subject matter. The speaker admits to being “astounded / by a great lake” and describes “the way my own heart leaps” at a corrie lake (A Quarrel with the Lexicographers). Throughout, there is a strong sense of the delights and balm of nature, and of our failings to adequately respect them and the environmental damage that ensues.

The prevailing urge is to confirm or to instruct rather than to startle or thrill, and there are moments of appealing quietness and salve, as in the lovely poem Four Wonderful Sounds, or the final stanza of Oughtmama (where the placename shifts a consonant over the course of the poem):

Something about Ouchtmama

makes me want to lie quietly down

in its tangles of flowers and grasses

forget sorrow, and then carry on.

If at times the poems seem to insist rather too firmly on the security of aphorism (“for what do a musician’s hands ever hold / but the hammered treasure of the human soul?”, the title poem asks), it is the welcome note of gentle observation that is this collection’s freshest and most appealing signature.

Two kinds of discovery animate the poems of Afric McGlinchey’s à la belle étoile (Salmon, £12). Firstly, the voyage of a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne Baré, “peasant herbalist” and first woman to circumnavigate the world. In 1771, at the height of the Age of Exploration, Baré disguised herself as the valet of her lover, botanist Philibert Commerçon, and boarded the l’Étoile to join its global expedition. This voyage of discovery was to result in their gathering 30 specimen boxes of rare plants (including the now ubiquitous bougainvillea, named for the ship’s captain) from lands as far-flung as Madagascar, Tahiti, Samoa, Mauritius and Brazil.

The second, darker discovery, is Baré’s unmasking as a woman and subsequent gang rape by the ship’s crew.

To both one might add a third exploration narrative, that of Baré’s own story, largely navigated, it seems, by female researchers, finally resulting in her achievements being honoured – including at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Her fascinating story is told here in a book-length sequence of projected first-person poems (Baré was literate, but didn’t record her own story).

It’s a brave imaginative projection, this conjuring of a plausibly historical voice – the danger is that the telling will get in the way of the tale. Happily that’s not the case here, with the narrative voice beautifully managed to convey the journey’s excitements, dangers and discoveries. In the title poem, Jeanne declares, “My days have grown large, crowded with learning, noon apple-dreams and wonderings, / gusty as a million guesses!” and the sequence never quite loses sight of that wide-eyed and winning jouissance, despite adversity. As Every Revolution concludes:

And, just like a girl, open-armed, I go spinning,

quick-spying the sun, still far from falling

into the saffron horizon.

Vona Groarke is the new Ireland Professor of Poetry