Once I saw the poet Michael Donaghy perform a miracle. He cast a spell to raise the dead, or, rather, the near-dead. Several years ago, at the West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania, the exhausted conferees, myself included, were draped over their seats, as a handful of poets took turns at the podium. (There comes a point at conferences when hearing another poem feels like forking into a sixth or 16th slice of cake.) Then a poet I’d never heard of shambled onto the stage to recite from memory poems that had an extraordinary effect.

Precisely, effortlessly, the poet administered a charm that left even the most enervated in the audience blinking at their neighbors in disbelief. People didn’t know what had hit them. His elegant, deeply felt poems levitated the entire crowd and held them hovering above their chairs.

“Who is this guy?” we wondered. And well might you. Michael Donaghy was not widely known in this country, though he was born here, in the Bronx, in 1954. Of Irish heritage, he moved in 1985 to England, where most of his books were published. Were it not for the efforts of champions like Dana Gioia and Michael Peich, co-founders of the West Chester conference, he might not be known here at all.

It has been a melancholy year for poetry, with the passing of Thom Gunn, Donald Justice, and Czeslaw Milosz, but Donaghy’s death earlier this month, at age 50, is perhaps the most shocking. A member of the so-called New Generation of British poets – along with Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, and others – Donaghy produced only three slim volumes in his 30-odd years of writing, but each was extraordinary. Now half his poems will remain unwritten.

An accomplished folk musician (on flute and bodhran), a consummate performer of his own poems, and a gifted literary craftsman, Donaghy possessed a sensibility that issued as fully from the public house as from the Renaissance playhouse. His poems were colloquial and tautly Metaphysical at once. Take “Machines,” which spins out a conceit mingling a pavane by Purcell with a 12-speed bicycle:

The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.
So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove
Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

Donaghy embeds in this love poem a striking ars poetica. Routinely balancing energy with control, high diction with low, his deftly managed forms finally melt into air, leaving only a pure voicing of thought and emotion. Finally, it is the reader who feels moved (Donaghy could not resist a pun). His final, elegiac collection, “Conjure,” winner of the Forward prize, features poems that invoke the ghost of his father. Few poets as capable of finely tuned verse and as assured of the power of the page can manage poems that sound so utterly spoken, so alive in the mouth. Donaghy begins “Caliban’s Books” with an eerie incantation:

Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid’s ink … Bear with me. I’m trying to conjure my father, age fourteen, as Caliban – picked by Mr. Quinn for the role he was born to play because “I was the handsomest boy at school” he’ll say, straight-faced, at fifty. This isn’t easy. I’ve only half the spell, and I won’t be born for twenty years. I’m trying for rain light on Belfast Lough and listening for a small, blunt accent barking over the hiss of a stove getting louder like surf.

When would Michael Donaghy’s poems, like Glyn Maxwell’s, have crossed the Atlantic to find an American audience? It’s hard to say. His books have not yet been published here, and he wrote far less than many of his peers. No doubt they would have caught on at some point, and with any luck they will even now. When it happens, it will mark a homecoming of sorts, for the work if not for the man. Home becomes a place that the poems are keen to revisit or to re-create, as in the single long sentence of “Haunts,” spoken by the poet’s father:

Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me, though not as I’ve appeared before, on the battlements of your signature, or margin of a book you can’t throw out, or darkened shop front where your face first shocks itself into a mask of mine, but here, alive, on Christmas long ago when you were three, upstairs, asleep, and haunting me because I conjured you the way that child you were would cry out waking in the dark, and when you spoke in no child’s voice but out of radio silence, the hall clock ticking like a radar blip, a bottle breaking faintly streets away, you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.

Recently, Donaghy made an actual homecoming to New York City. Growing up, he’d worked as a doorman in the building where his father was the super. One day in the elevator, Joan Jacobson of the 92nd Street Y discovered him reading poems. She arranged for Michael to receive a membership in the Y’s Poetry Center, where, he once told me, he felt he’d grown up listening to the greats. Michael Donaghy returned to the Poetry Center last spring, as a reader this time. The audience welcomed its prodigal son with open arms.

Mr. Yezzi is director of the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.