Imposing a common theme on a composite review of books, particularly verse or poetry, is normally lazy practice and usually silly.

Yet a common and contrary lightheadedness creates a pleasurable pattern to these four titles.

Welsh poet Dannie Abse, at 90, talks of himself as being "in the mildew of age" where "pavements slope uphill" and the animal in the title of Speak, Old Parrot (Hutchison, £15) is "the ventriloquist bird". This convenient persona speaks in evocative echoes of the series of love poems, Two For Joy (2010), recording the death of his wife Joan in a car accident in 2005. She is also tenderly recalled in his prose memoir The Presence (2007). In these new poems she is most powerfully depicted by absence. The Bus tells of a rambling round trip between Llantwin Major and Bridgend. A bus "empty but terrific with light".

A series of poems nominally dealing with the ribald passions of Dafydd ap Gwilym has the ancient and modern poet suffering in common with "summer frustration". They are having a wintering time of it. Abse then adopts a valedictory tone: "hear me, love. Without you I'm in motley cloth/without a cause – just a funny bard who plays the clown." Abse, most generous of contemporary poets, finally introduces "Ghosts released from Time (who) walked into the world of light", concluding with wry resignation, "Now I'm tired and you nest elsewhere. /Bird, your cage is empty. Will you come back? /I see no feathers in the wind".

Light is a shroud wrapped round a stoic sensibility in Tiger Facing The Mist (Bloodaxe, £8.95), Pauline Stainer's first substantial collection in nearly a decade. "This is the art /of passing through." It permeates the insight of poems such as Shibui: "I keep to the soft greys /of understatement." Slender in lineation, but never thin, light is given colour: "we wait /for that rekindling /which conjures /a blue abstract /out of the flaxfield." In the short but wonderful poem George Herbert Plays The Lute we meet "the singing men of Sarum /seeing the silence between sound /shake its magical apparel". As in previous collections, snow clothes Stainer's landscapes. It is her sensual companion. "Snowflakes /each a latchkey /to language /its bright anxiety/ never repeated."

The Muscovy of Matthew Francis's fourth collection, Muscovy (Faber, £12.99), was a 13th-18th century Russian principality with Moscow as its capital. Aberystwyth-based Francis skilfully allows historical perspectives to undermine and positively corrupt contemporary political conventions. Politics become the polemic of metaphors. This is literary subversion at its best and most rewarding. Subtle with nuance his "Wild Geese" are not those of Yeats but a "whim of flight" leaving the observing poet "a flapping biped".

Such bipeds emerge from the shadows to become illuminated presences in the episodic Things That Make The Heart Beat Faster (after Sei Shonagan). Images pile upon images: "Braziers glow in the morning cold. /By noon they're burned out, a frost of ash." A riddle is given a quixotic reply: "What's small and makes its home in the dark? / -the hairline/sound of a mosquito". The glow in the dark evolves until "the world is a moon". Near the end the poet, mock-humble, declares this "a poem of modest triumph: /I made this out of what does not last". It does; it will. Ephemeral as light the images have cast substantial shadows. This is elementary creativity.

The award-winning David Harsent gives new energy to the short poems of a great Greek writer in In Secret: Versions Of Yannis Ritsos (Enitharmon, £9.99). Once again it is the sense of boundaries glimpsed in momentary light movements that catch the ear and stop the heart. Marxist by instinct, Socialist by conviction and Communist by party allegiance, Ritsos (1909-1990) suffered imprisonment for many years under disparate regimes, jailed for the freedom of mind expressed in publicly proclaimed and acclaimed popular verses. His were times and themes where one "will sit here until the fires burn out, until the ash /grows cold /until the house is held in boundless night". And then awake to speak again in the light of a new day.