Adam O'Riordan opens In the Flesh with a page-long poem called, simply, "Manchester". As well he might: this is his first collection, and Manchester is the city of his birth. But rather than describing the city in 2010, or even in 1982, when he made his entrance into it, he fishes back through time to the moment of Manchester's pomp, when it stood as the world's first bona fide industrial boom town. "Queen of the cotton cities", he addresses it magniloquently in the opening line, "nightly I piece you back into existence"  and goes on to do just that, through succulent descriptions of the "frayed bridal train" of factory chimneys; the "warped applause-track of Victorian rain" that wets the miry streets.

This fascination with what's gone provides the impetus that drives O'Riordan's bewitchingly recherché debut. Again and again, in an attempt to stage a recovery of the lives that are in danger of disappearing beneath the swirl of the past, his poems fix on objects imbued with personal history and bring their stories back to the surface.

In the neat sonnet sequence "Vanishing Points", O'Riordan chooses three articles from three different years  the beach huts from a 1930 family holiday, a 1906 letter from a father to his daughter on her wedding day, a Dunfermline trade union college in 1983  and wrings out their resonance. In the first sonnet, the shadow of the future presses on the family  "basking in the salt-air and sun between two wars"  and the mood is one of chagrin at the passage of time, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of happiness. In the second, however, a formal feeling is achieved: the letter becomes a flare that illuminates the past's darkness. The father's identity "clings" to it "like a broken web to a windowsill", its words revealing fragments of a man who "at wakes would carry . . . hospitality to extravagance" and "never spoke English with any satisfaction". "I roll your word for liquor, usquebaugh, around my mouth", the speaker says reverently, before letting the whiskey drip down into a lustrous final couplet in which the last line is spun out beyond its natural length to extend the warmth of the moment: "You are distilled before you disappear forever / like the raised glass, the sunlight on one last golden measure."

Seeking for things that are lost is a preoccupation. Even in the poems set in the present day there's a pervasive sense of absence  though here what's missing tends to be love. "Goooogle" offers a prayer for "the men who sit, / pale as geishas", feeding their computers with "maiden names / and zip codes / of ex-lovers"; "The Moth" ends with the speaker sitting in the dark "on a bed too small to contain your absence"; in the nifty "NGC3949" (the number-tag of "a galaxy in Ursa Major whose formation mirrors, almost exactly, that of our own"), a glimpse of "the cut and sway of a dark form" conjures mistakenly, achingly, a former flame.

A pair of sonnets entitled "The Edges of Love" see O'Riordan coming at the idea of lack from a different angle  examining conditional absences, the things that might have been. Both are written in an implicating second-person. In the first, a conference-goer looks out of his window and falls for "a figure crossing a field" while "back home in a bright room / your children are being kissed and tucked into their sheets"; in the second, a new father locks eyes with a stranger "and a lifetime unfolds" in the moment before "she disappears again". All these absences give the title a retrospective wash of irony: very few of the subjects are here in the flesh, after all. But flesh itself sprawls across these pages, adding a sticky sheen to compositions that are otherwise elegantly formal.

It's there, gloriously, in a handful of feverish poems on sex. In one, "Cheat", "with him away" (absence again) the speaker "sunk with the fluke of your hips, / our movements incessant as a distaff and spindle". In another two food and sex intermingle, most memorably in the mixing of a bloody mary.

Elsewhere, though, desire tips quickly into disgust. In the superb "The Leverets", the arrival of a baby is balanced by a cat's gift of "a frail bag of fur" spilling "a fine rope of gut" on the doorstep, while in the graceful-grisly "The Corpse Garden" a man keeps watch over a "patch of campus" in which unidentified bodies are left to rot in order to determine a cause of death. "I stay with the dead," the speaker says, "through their putrefaction / mapping the body's catastrophic geography. / Nursemaids to insects, their skin laced with eggs / like strings of pearls".

For all its verve, this is not a flawless debut. Odd phrases jar and sag. The central sequence, "Home"  written during O'Riordan's term as poet-in-residence at Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in the Lake District  is somewhat patchy, with the poet returning again to a sonnet form that begins to jangle through overuse. Here the pieces feel less natural, more contrived than the rest of the collection. But there's a poise and precision to his writing, a gift for imagery and a willingness to venture far from home and explore multiple (frequently unsympathetic) voices that give his poems a preternatural maturity. Expect a great deal more from Adam O'Riordan in years to come.

This collection does not read like a debut. It has an established feel  as if Adam O'Riordan, who is in his mid-20s, had been around for decades. Only that makes him sound dusty, and he isn't. The unfashionable beauty of this collection  shining, musical, aloof  is that it is intimate without being confessional.

After leaving Oxford, O'Riordan was, for a year, poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust and his debt to the Romantics is clear. But his own subjects extend confidently beyond the pastoral: there is an awful (in the best sense) sequence of poems, "The Act of Falling", about Emily Davison, the suffragette killed by the King's horse at the Derby, an opening poem saluting Manchester and another entitled "A Trade Union College, Dunfermline, 1983". But he also writes with precise wit about the natural world: a moth is "a natural under the spotlight"; a crab apple is "of performing arts the slowest". And the sea is inescapable as a love affair: "the salt's relentless intimacy". This collection is a most finished beginning.

"Goooogle" (its extra oo's like two popping eyes) sets the tone: sympathetic, witty and sage in its attitude towards the romantic boffin and his diminished life, pursuing ex-lovers online. It is beautifully done, and there is sober comedy in the uselessly summoned information: "Homecoming Queen, Quaker settler, tenured academic".

But O'Riordan's imagination is a search engine of a different kind and he is determined not to let poetic opportunity slip. He is fired by souvenirs and bygones  a photo taken with a Box Brownie camera ("Vanishing Points: Beach Huts, Milford 1930"), a seaside postcard ("Cheat"), double basins where the Wordsworths  William and Dorothy  once washed their hands ("A Double Wash Stand"). One marvels at how much time  past, present and future  a single poem can hold. In "Vanishing Points" we skim from a photo of a mother and her boys into their future: one dies in a burning tank; the other, at his mother's deathbed, will "wildly shake/a bell for nurse, then drive in silence to collect the priest".

O'Riordan excels at squeezebox poetry  time concertinas. His imagination exists on the brink of extinction ("sudden and bright and in a moment over"). Poetry is salvage: "Think of our life together becoming utterly lost,/and lift this camera like a bible for an oath."

These are incantatory poems that insist on being read aloud. Sounds extend emotions and take the poems further than one thought they could go. It is this that makes much of his writing erotic  that and his eye for detail. In two sexy companion pieces, "On Fixing a Bloody Mary" and "Oysters", the poems appear on facing pages, as if at a table for two. Oysters are hammered open until: "light moves in the darkened chamber./ Naked on its bed of bone, you offer it: vulviform, raw, exposed." The Bloody Mary tastes of "fermented honey". In another poem, "Dressing", a lover applies make-up and paints herself out of the narrator's radar and the room with "blinds half-lowered like eyelids before a kiss". And in the stunning "A Department Store Escalator, Paris", a woman is sighted on an escalator and an imagined biography takes hold, the shared life they will never lead. "In the café your wife asks why you're so distracted. Nothing, you tell her, it's nothing." It is life's answer to Google, the vivid sighting of a stranger  a passing moment  in the flesh.