I had never read Ada Limón when I dipped into Bright Dead Things and The Carrying (published simultaneously in Britain), but have since discovered that Limón is far from an unknown quantity in her native US. Bright Dead Things, her fourth collection, was shortlisted for the National Book award and feted by Tracy K Smith, the US poet laureate. Limón has been published in the New Yorker and the New York Times. And she is that rare thing – a poet whose work sells.

It sells for the same reason that it spoke to me. I was ambushed by her power to move – several poems brought a lump to my throat. Yet her popularity is about more than accessibility. She never hides behind words but reveals herself through them – even when the risk is overexposure. She situates herself in her writing as a figure in a landscape – rural Kentucky – and her struggles (especially with fertility in Carrying) are set against this unheeding pastoral scene. In a recent interview, she said she thought it important that poets should not “just write poems for other poets”. She makes no apology for keeping it simple.

The Carrying is her fifth collection and its opening poem, A Name, imagines Eve in the garden of Eden naming the animals “nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,/ fiddler crab, fallow deer” and then continues: “I wonder if she ever wanted/ them to speak back, looked into/ their wide wonderful eyes and/ whispered, Name me, name me.” I initially balked at “wide wonderful” as Disney adjectives (although might they not also be accurate?) but what matters most is the poem’s directness and what so many of her poems share – an instinctive sense of where and how to end. She knows how to change direction at the last moment, knows an ending can be an elsewhere.

The book is full of the importance of naming. In Against Belonging, about a new home defining itself, she writes about how, “With each new name, the world expanded.” In On a Lamppost Long Ago, she writes about languages disappearing and continues: “There are too many things to hold in the palm of the brain./ Your father with Alzheimer’s uses the word thing to describe/ many different nouns and we guess the word he means./ When we get it right, he nods as if it’s obvious./ When we get it wrong, his face closes like a fist.”

Throughout – tacitly underlying all this naming – is, perhaps, an unconceived, longed for, unnamed child. In Mastering, she writes about the hideousness of a friend swanking about his child in her presence. There is an aloneness in this poetry – even in company – and at the same time a generosity in the sharing with readers.

What is particularly unusual is that Limón finds an ardour in compromise, making her peace with childlessness and with life’s imperfection. It seems that this period of trying to conceive has pushed her poetry to its limit, that it exists on the frontier between something and nothing. It describes an effortful time that makes these apparently effortless, quick-release poems all the more merciful and beautiful. There is nothing self-indulgent here but there is humorous self-assertion. In Prey she advises: “Don’t be the mouse” – and she isn’t.

Part of the pleasure of reading Limón is the way she transports you to a Kentucky punctuated by the noise of trains, the presence of horses, the planting of seeds. She does not ignore the world’s cruelties but tries not to be held hostage by them. This is as-the-crow flies poetry – it goes straight to the heart.

• The Carrying by Ada Limón is published by Corsair (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Carrying by Ada Limón

The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stakes winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.