The wave in this humane and visionary collection symbolises the flow of time and tide around and over individual lives. Dunmore’s cancer diagnosis is in the background, combined with the turbulence of mortality everyone experiences as they grow older. But these waves carry many stories and journeys. Five sharp little translations from the Roman poet Catullus include a wonderfully succinct version of Ave Atque Vale. In the title poem, the subject is the homecoming of the “dirty old mariner” Odysseus. After a reunion with a balding, ageing, self-absorbed wife (the offstage carnage evoked by the image of a fountain pulsing out blood), he returns to lengthy sea-gazing. “At the lip of the wave, foam/ Stuttered and broke,” he observes, as if witnessing his own dissolution. “It was on the inside/ Of the wave he chose/ To meditate endlessly/ Without words or song,/ And so he lay down/ To watch it at eye-level,/ About to topple/ About to be whole.”

Lying down and watching the world at eye level constitutes much of what poets and novelists do and Dunmore’s work in both genres is always alive with sensuous detail. Here, we’re shown in vivid close-up the beaches, boating lakes, swimming pools of everyday navigation, as well as the mythic oceans. In At the Spit, we learn the sounds the contemporary wanderer, resting against his or her backpack, will hear on the beach: “… the click/ And tumble of pebbles, slumbrous/ Geography shifting: this is the land mass/ And this the plastic, the wrack, the mess/ To pick over in search of a home.” Assonance and alliteration fill the soundtrack and remind us that Dunmore has a fine ear as well as eye and knows how to persuade the stanza, rhymed or unrhymed, to make appropriate music.

Like many of these poems, At the Spit refuses finally to wrap up the experience with lyric neatness. The patches of passing time a Dunmore poem occupies exist in a larger chronology and perhaps her greatest skill is in conveying vibrations of that invisible meta-narrative. This occurs on several levels in one of my favourites of the collection, What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for? Taking two refrain lines from the Song of Solomon, “I have a little sister, she has no breasts” and the question asked in the title, the poem encompasses the paradox of a life lovingly protected but potentially diminished. Religious and cultural gender stereotypes are hinted at, but the journey from youthful hope to maturity’s silenced acquiescence also resonates as a common human experience.

Dunmore draws on memory a good deal, often contrasting her verb tenses to disturb chronology and produce broad, dreamlike effects. In Nightfall in the Ikea Kitchen, the speaker finds herself in “the place where I begin again/ As a twenty-three year old Finn/ Taking the keys of her first home”. This is not simply an “I remember when” scenario: there is an omniscient perspective on the future and, finally, a rush forwards from the birth of a child, catered for by a room divider that facilitates both “child storage” and “a home office”, to that child’s departure as a young man: “When he grows up and moves out/ Just take down the partition/ To have, at last, my own space again.” This narrative is a wonderful example of the novelistic imagination, that boat that navigates time and space, redirecting the flow of the lyric poem into unfamiliar territory.

Terra Incognita

And now we come to the unknown land
With its blue coves and inlets where sweet water
Bubbles against the salt. Its sand
Is ready for footprints. Give me your hand

Onto the rock where the seaweed clings
And the red anemone throbs in its crevice
Through swash and backwash. These things
Various as the brain’s comb and the tide’s swing

Or the first touch of untouched terrain
On our footsoles, as the land explores us,
Have become our fortune. Let me explain
Which foods are good to eat, and which poison.

• Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore is published by Bloodaxe (£9.95). To order a copy for £7.46 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99