THERE is an early poem in Hans Magnus Enzensberger: New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £15) in which he explains why poets “do not tell the truth”:

“Because the thirsty man/does not give mouth to his thirst./Because proletariat is a word/which will not pass the lips of the proletariat... Because it is someone else,/always someone else,/who does the talking,/and because he/who is being talked about,/keeps his silence.”

It’s an issue to which Enzensberger has repeatedly returned — how do you use language to talk about things? How do you use words to tell the truth about language? How, in a noisy world, do you resist the temptations of silence?

Enzensberger, unarguably one of the most important European poets of the last 50 years, is also a novelist, critic, editor and translator and his books have been translated into over 40 languages.

A Marxist, he was a member of the influential Group 47, and has often been described as a natural heir to Brecht — “I see you betrayed/by your disciples,” he writes in Karl Heinrich Marx, “only your enemies/remained what they were.”

This selection draws on poems from the 1960 collection Language of the Country to A History of Clouds, published in 2003. It’s a big book in every sense, showing the range of Enzensberger’s concerns and the scale of his historical imagination although, oddly, it doesn’t include any of the “Titanic” sequence from his important 1978 Cuban book The Sinking of the Titanic.

Plain and learned, cold and clever, Enzensberger is always good at suggesting the violent chaos just beneath the surface:

“Car bombs do the rounds, wives/land from the catalogues,/bank accounts shift by satellite./Brand new viruses come floating in./Only now and then by the roadside/there’s a beggar lying, motionless.”

The second half of the book especially is dominated by a series of Juvenalian satires on the follies of the post-1990 world prophecies of doom:
“For every man smashing his beer bottle/on the asylum-seeker’s head/a surgeon in casualty/patching it up... For every mine-clearer/risking life and limb/an arms-dealer... for every social worker a neo-Nazi... Oh, every one of us/has his hands full./There is no end in sight.”

There is arguably no British poet closer to Enzensberger in temperament, range, technique or reputation than Sean O’Brien. Like Enzensberger, he has often deployed the cool, ironic voice of the poet in exile.

Both men are drawn to apocalyptic urban landscapes of rain and fog. “Where once the Wild Wood grew, the in-between/Emerges as a bleak and Badgerless republic,” writes O’Brien, “cider bottles, rutted earth and Durex.”

And, like Enzensberger, O’Brien is sometimes tempted by a cynical misanthropy, as in Residential Brownjohnesque.

But O’Brien’s ninth collection, The Beautiful Librarians (Picador, £9.99) also contains half a dozen poems about contemporary Britain as good as anything you are likely to read anywhere this year, notably Oysterity, Pedagogy, The Beautiful Librarians, The Lost of England and War Graves.

In Another Country, O’Brien recalls a colleague who once stole an NUM collection tin in the staff room of the school where he was teaching:
“You stand for everything there was to loathe about the South –/The avarice, the snobbery, the ever-sneering mouth, /The lack of solidarity with any cause but me,/The certainty that what you were was what the world should be.”

Best of all is Infantry, in which O’Brien catalogues the accumulated defeats of the northern industrial working class in a kind of parody of Geoffrey Hill:
“Fog, smoke, rain, the swags of hanging gas, they are all one to us./We made this rain our own,/Picking for nuts on the sands of the coal coast,/Dining from tins at the pier-end in smeasling rain...Brunt-takers, those who have to understand/That this is more of that,/The same old shit... the ones that get the blame... The warhorse to the knacker’s gone/And all his laughter took.”

Gordon Hodgeon writes about a very different kind of silence. Following a series of unsuccessful operations on his spine, he is unable to move his arms and legs and cannot breathe without the help of a ventilator. In the last few months he has lost the power of speech. Today he can only communicate with the outside world by blinking at a Dynavox computer screen.

And yet Hodgeon has continued to write, recording the changing seasons of his disability and the changeless seasons outside his window. The result is Talking to the Dead (Smokestack, £4.95), an extraordinary series of poems from the furthest edge of human endurance. It is a book about disability and mortality, a painful study in helpless silence:

“Stumm/is what I have become/is who I am/dumbfounded in my brain./The din of its foundry/resounds and finds/there’s no way out of/the confines of my skull.”

These are the words of a man who cannot speak, the poems of a writer who cannot pick up a pen, talking to those who have gone before and those who will come after:
“My plan is to join with/The anonymous dead,/Forgotten soon enough,/No memorial stones,/I’ve seen too many./I will hold hands with death/And all of you, my folk,/In the glorious dance of the earth.”