The Night Tree
by Jane Draycott
64pp, Carcanet, £7.95

Poetry persuades by the precision of its language, and this necessary exactness is carefully and coldly won over years of drafting and redrafting. Jane Draycott's first collection, Prince Rupert's Drop, was well received and rightly so. Her work had a patient intelligence of practice, and concision of address, not only in every poem in that book but in the very philosophy of perception informing her poetics. Her collection set a lofty point from which to advance. Happily for her growing number of readers The Night Tree goes even further in its elegance and imaginative force.

She succeeds because, in the end, it's down to her confidence: a writerly coolness coupled with a sense of a workable, completely engaged aesthetic. The price of precision can be perfectionism, an attitude that can result in freezing before the headlights of your own expectations. At this point in a poet's vocation, the resilience of the personality has a great say in whether artistic progress is made or not. In short, you either freeze or thaw. Everything experienced so far, everything written and read, decides that outcome. It is a learned process and the consequence is ultimately decisive and life-changing. It can precipitate artistic crisis: poetic careers can fall apart, the language becoming clinical or unraveled.

Not so for Draycott. The Night Tree is a calculated, amazing thaw, made up from icy, prickly detail. Her attention to detail has paid off hugely; and she knows the price of it. One example, from the sequence "Tideway" (a series of meditations on the Thames), is the short poem, "It begins as with razors", the lift-off point for which is that lightermen on the river once bought their pipes pre-packed, then threw them overboard. Here it is in full:

   It begins as with razors or lighters,
   its sharpness or fire akin to a ship
   that is passing, a fragment or sample
   of something much bigger and further away
   such as fathomless caverns of silver,
   whole acres of indigo, saffron or hemp
   or hillside on hillside of spices or tea
   laid out like a rug to lie down on or sleep.
   By capping the bowl like the door
   to a furnace some made it last longer,
   run cooler for breathing in deeper
   its skyfuls of clouds, so that burdens
   grown lighter could rise in the water
   like palaces turning to smoke,
   for a pipe once alight is a dream
   which is now or is never and ends
   like a pile of disposable bones
   washed up on the foreshore
   where in the same place the body
   of a river ran just hours before.

What Draycott manages in two sentences contains a world. It isn't just the concise audacity of the imagery created here that is persuasive ("sharpness of fire akin to a ship that is passing"; "capping the bowl like the door to a furnace"), it's also her adroit control of language within the determined rhythmic clarity of what's almost a sea-shanty form ("a pipe once alight is a dream / which is now or is never and ends / like a pile of disposable bones"). It is very hard to write this simply, nor is it simple to set so many internal rhymes in place, their gears interlocking almost soundlessly, without making the poem clank as wildly as a cartoon grandfather clock. Draycott's confidence secures the registers and makes a fine, clear lyric. Moreover, she makes significance out of insignificance. Say it out loud; you'll want to sing it in time. Time's the theme.

Like the best poets at the peak of confidence, Draycott can also be playful. The way she plays, however, is by making strange, such as in the poem "How he knew he was turning to glass", an artful examination of the proofs of that transformation: "By the playing like wind in his hair of exhalations / from the distant leper colony. / By the images of himself repeated in the candelabras / of his erections..."

Or she can play on expectations by taking something familiar, setting it in another unrelated but again familiar context, and seeing what emerges. I enjoy any ceremony in which literature proposes to science. The children of such a coupling usually lack any dread of reason (while some poets fly the room at the smell of it). Draycott plainly enjoys this observance too, especially in a cunning poem in which Sherlock Holmes receives a fellowship from the Royal Society of Chemistry: "He appears for a moment to fade, lost / in the fog which encircles his head. / The microphone leans towards him / like a question shouted into the wind / Who are you waiting for on such / a freezing night? Areas of his brain / are needles of fire, clear signals across / open ground. The carpet rolls its red road / out across centuries of snow. / And what is it you fear so greatly? / Disembodied mind swirls in free- fall / beyond the window pane, frost calculates / its way across the floor. As you value / your reason, keep away from the moor."

As you value your reason, then you probably value good poetry. I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact The Night Tree is the finest collection I've read for ages. What are you waiting for?

· David Morley's latest collection of poetry is Scientific Papers (Carcanet). He directs the Warwick writing programme at the University of Warwick.