John Ashbery's style, with its Whitman-like relish for all kinds of everything, is well attuned to the online world of fingertip "likes" and favourites and of multiple points of view. His new book, Breezeway (Carcanet, £9.99), absorbs more contemporary culture into its sometime-melancholy, sometime-jokey sentences than any of his many younger imitators, as is clear in these lines from Seven-Year-Old Auroch Likes This:

Thanks

to a snakeskin toupee, my grayish push boots

exhale new patina/prestige. Exeunt the Kardashians.

Exit the emergency room.

Reading Ashbery is like watching a 1940s screwball comedy while talking on the phone and hearing a radio broadcast the news in the next room, as he noses his way from one found phrase to another.

"I wouldn't try to capture it / on the page, or in a blog, the inauspicious / leavings of a day," he writes in Gravy for the Prisoners, one of the many poems here which rise from a groundswell of puns to a graver music. A Sweet Disorder begins, crankily, "Pardon my sarong, I'll have a Shirley Temple. / Certainly, sir. Do you want a cherry with that? / I guess so. It's part of it isn't it?", but its ending's suggestive magic is why Ashbery has so many imitators:

Are these our containers?

Pardon my past, because, you know,

it was like all one piece.

It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention

that I would argue.

How was it supposed to look?

Do I wake or sleep?

Wit and vulnerability

The Scottish poet Don Paterson’s new collection, 40 Sonnets (Faber and Faber, £14.99), is, in spite of the title’s suggestion of formal rigour, typically various. There are satirical jibes and occasional signs of hobbyhorses being remounted.

His best poems, though, those which make this book essential, work his wit and conceits into scenes whose helplessness they cannot do anything but tenderly register. There are terrific poems about photography (and Francesca Woodman in particular) and a powerful Scots expansion of an Ishikawa tanka. Nostalgia cannot forget "the stars are also under us / where they sink and sail into the dark like cinders"; Wave adopts the point of view of, well, a wave, and begins, "For months I'd moved across the open water / like a wheel under its skin."

The Roundabout recounts a visit he and his sons make to a playground soon after the poet has split up with their mother: "Its thrawn mass / was like trying to push a tree over, or row / a galley sealed in ice. I was all for / giving up when we felt it give, and go."

Covering new ground

If Paterson likes to stir up the critics, so too does Australian poet Les Murray, whose lastest collection, Waiting for the Past (Carcanet, £9.99), is a PBS Choice in the UK. If the more opinionated poems will have readers scratching their heads, Murray’s best work continues to brilliantly outline a world and way of life: at his best, his observant, take-things-as-they-are style clips across more territory in a poem than many other poets cover in a lifetime.

Inhabitants of his new collection include A Denizen: "The octopus is dead / who lived in Wylie's Baths / below the circus balustrade / and the chocked sea tiles." If the nicely iambic rhythm of that counterpoints its unlikely subject, then West Kimberley emerges from an inventive blur of trochees and spondees in Order of Perception: "Water like a shambles of milk / at the end of the Wet // crowding down an ironstone flume/ in the continent's roared walls."

Age and illness are much on his mind in this new book. The Care sees that "Old age is eventually a cat // which starts on the brain of its prey/ so the words come with a delay / and finally hardly at all". And a remorseless daydream of a poem like Self and Dream Self catches the way memories, unbidden, haunt the speaker: "Routines of decaying time / fade, and your waking life / gets as laborious as science", it begins, then plunges:

vivid drone of talk,

yet few loves return:

trysts seem unkeepable.

Urgencies from your time

join with the browner suits

walking the arcades with you

but then you are apart

The English poet RF Langley never attained the public profile of the other poets under review here, although his slow-starting publication career was garlanded with prizes at the end. His posthumous Complete Poems (Carcanet, £12.99) shows exactly why this is so. Touchstone hears "the late robin in the / dark garden. A gift, // a lock, a wedge, an / order or a wistfulness", which later occasions, among other thoughts,

There was no ‘before’. The world

set off with time, not into it.

Accompanied by dusk the

further phrases sing out

off the line-post, melodic,

desultory, sweet snatches at

masks, small personal cheers,

most of your education for

these years. This grass and dusty

hawthorn and this ten-o-clock

to float you home.

Gorgeously detailed and slyly intimate, these dramatically descriptive poems show him to be the heir to Edward Thomas, whose wonderful long poem Lob lies behind the enjambed, thoughtful precisions of his Man Jack, and in the hesitations and sudden insights of his last poem, his To a Nightingale.

“Nothing along the road,” it begins, before elaborating on an entire world he finds there.

John McAuliffe's fourth book The Way In is out from The Gallery Press. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester