Blood Feather, by the award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer Patrick McGuinness – also an academic (he teaches French at Oxford) – was prompted by the death of his mother. He has not published any poetry for 13 years, until now and this marvellous collection. He is writing about bereavement as erasure. The poems themselves seem slightly surprised by their existence, as if given half a chance, they might remove themselves from the page. Looking at his mother’s photograph, in Mother As Mirror, makes him feel that “I was the illusion”. Sure Things deftly explains there is no such thing as “sure” and, like the jetty that turns out not to exist, he feels unable to hang on to his own words. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, a prose piece, he playfully proposes: “Of all the poems I’ve ever written, this is the one I didn’t.”

Every word that crosses the border into poetry is worth reading. I loved Today Is Already Over, in which he remembers his mother’s pointless approach to tidying up. He does not need to acknowledge the inescapable thought that she has been cleared away herself. And he has more to add: “…she cleared up around me – /not after me but before./Removing my traces as I went…” (erasure again). It is a feat to write weight-bearing poems of such lightness. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable, not least because of his mother’s disequilibrium (there are poems that sensitively allude to psychiatric hospital and to her undergoing ECT).

His mother was Belgian and French-speaking, his father Irish. Diverting questions about the double life of being bilingual arise but this collection is more about writing as survival: if you fail to find the words you need, in any language, what you have to say will vanish. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, he describes dreaming that he cannot read his dying mother’s lips: “I’m not even sure they are words and in what language”. In Mother As Bird, he compares her to a sparrow that loses itself in the host: “She left in her hundreds, left me alone in her thousands, / and when her wings opened they closed the sky.”

What makes these poems moving is partly the emptiness where conversation might have been. Telephones play oppressive leading roles (good lines about bad lines). In Clackmuir, from the asylum: “She called from wall-mounted / phones in corridors”. In Mother As Hostage, about later days: “it’s hard to hear because she holds her face / too far from the receiver.” Landline describes clearing his mother’s house after her death (his turn to tidy) and notes: “the polished square where the phone had sat”.

At the Back of the Painting is a dark liberation that describes what one envisages as a troubled Vermeer. He imagines his mother:

…looking for the place
where it all stops: the dark window
from which she will pour,
endless in her freefall, her robe
a fluted line of white.

The collection brims with reverie and there are gripping poems about subjects not expecting attention: trains through Belgium, postindustrial landscapes and pigeons – the feral and the tame who live “show home lives” and “gentrify the air”. And for those willing to step into something even less appealing than a show home, there is Travelodge – a winning poem that ends:

The television is a furnace burning local news.
You are breathing wardrobe-air.
The plastic kettle rages and wants to know who’s there.

Only that, needless to say, the plastic kettle is not bothered. It is Patrick McGuinness who wants to know in this profound poet’s version of a knock-knock joke.

Sure Things

I start to tell myself the things I know
(well, the few things I’m still sure of):
poles in the swamp where I can build
the place I’ll stay my mind; the jetty
where I’ll moor it when I sleep,
and which I’ll aim for when I wake.

But as I tell myself those things
I know them less,
and when I speak them out
I do not know who’s speaking.

• Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply