The cover of Bernard O'Donoghue's new book is taken from a detail of a medieval manuscript showing hares hunting men -- illustrating the medieval notion of the "world upside down", writes Jenny Lewis.

This is reflected in the title poem Outliving My Father, where O'Donoghue speculates on the fact that, having now lived to a greater age than his father did, he is

'in new territory from here on' and

at liberty at last like mad Arnaut

to cultivate the wind, to hunt the bull

on hare-back, to swim against the tide.

As well as 12th-century troubadours -- 'mad Arnaut' is the troubadour poet, Arnaut Daniel -- the influences in this new collection, as in the previous three from the same publisher, are Dante the moralist, Chaucer the storyteller and the beauty of the natural world.

O'Donoghue's elegantly crafted, economical stories, often in the form of elegies to people he has outlived, not only recreate in vivid detail the rural Ireland of his childhood, but, like small parables, leave layers of meaning to dawn on us gradually.

In Vanishing Points, his daughter's trainers, as she sits in the dentist's chair with her "grazed knees, school jumper and clasped hands" remind him of a similar pair in a "photograph of the thrown-away body/ of the young Taliban soldier" in Kabul. The responsible parent, being cruel to be kind, is set against the "world upside down" travesty of parents and states using children to fight wars.

As a poet of conscience, O'Donoghue speaks for all of us who stand on the sidelines, horrified by, yet powerless against, the events we witness. Combined with huge generosity of spirit, wry humour and evocative descriptions of the Irish and English countryside, this is poetry of rare and compassionate intelligence that genuinely touches people and their lives.