The words “still life” and John Burnside do not belong together. I imagine the unattributed painting he beautifully describes in his poem Still Life to be a 17th-century Dutch genre painting (its neighbour, in this collection, is Hendrick Avercamp: A Standing Man Watching a Skating Boy). But perhaps the painting does not exist, except in Burnside’s imagination. We can visualise the canvas precisely with its Chinese glazes lang yao hong (oxblood) and qingbai (white with greenish tint) and its “blemished” grapes until it is eclipsed by a living scene. The painting is a memento mori but the poem does not – cannot – stay still. Someone – Burnside’s mother? – wraps apples in newspaper while he becomes visible, then vanishes, in the same and final line.

The now-you-see me, now-you-don’t moment is characteristic of a rich, moving and elusive collection that focuses on the difference between seeing and imagining and – as in the wish-you-were-here poem Still Life with Lost Cosmonaut – between absence and complicated presence.

What is remarkable about what is, incredibly, Burnside’s 15th collection, is the fresh sense of inquiry in these poems. The opening piece has a wordy, tongue-in-cheek title (he has a weakness for these): The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In. You cannot see where it is going, but that is its point. It begins with an unhappy parable about a man who, cured of blindness, is disappointed by what he sees: “and later, in the house he’d thought so clean and spacious – dirty now, and cramped – the birds he used to feed seemed dull and vulnerable to cats”.

The poem entertainingly (Burnside is adept at combining levity and gravity) likens God to the insurance man who used to call on Burnside’s mother and refuse her offered tea and biscuits, saying: “Thanks all the same, or “I’ll have to be getting along.” It is a poem about the ordinary and the sublime, the gap between what we see and what we hoped to be true. There is a reckoning in which the blind man understands that sight might “not be the gift he sought”, but is, nonetheless, a gift. It is a beautiful conclusion in its compromised way.

As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye, not to mention real and imaginary “cosmonauts”. He presides over more than one parallel universe. This is complicated by the sense, touched on in several poems, that he is made up of more than one self – the brother he never knew because he died as a baby contributes to this feeling. In Blue, he uses Baudelaire’s phrase mon semblable; mon frère!, but it could belong elsewhere too. Someone else, a stranger – a brother – his other half is always waiting for him in an empty house.

The collection’s funniest, saddest and most charming poem is Approaching Sixty, in which Burnside watches a girl, in a blue dress, in a cafe in Innsbruck. He is spellbound as she loosens her hair so that it falls to her waist and then winds it up again. He watches her and tries not to stare and takes stock of himself: “Striving to seem a comfortable kind/of scarecrow.” He may no longer be visible to the girl, but he wishes, at least, to be recognised as someone who “knows what beauty is”.

The joy of his poems – and part of what makes them moving – is that he does know and never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living.

• Still Life with Feeding Snake by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (£10). To order a copy for £7.50 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

Still Life With Lost Cosmonaut

If I imagine you dead, there is no love
immense enough to bring you back to earth;
but here, in this bowl of apples, on this kitchen
table, gold

and crimson in a space
that could not be more ample or precise

I see you drifting in the selfsame light
that I inhabit, wishing not

to occupy, or slip loose, or possess,
life being more to me than I could ever

wish for, colour, shape, the subtleties
of shade, and when I bite into the fruit,

the taste of it, much more than I could
wish for; though I wish you could be here