"Virginia Woolf thought that the income tax, if it continued, would benefit poets by enlarging their vocabularies and I dare say that she was right." So wrote Wallace Stevens in 1942, confronting the apparent "collapse of our system, or, call it, of life". Where income tax was once levied to fund wars (always, therefore, something supposed to end), it became, in the 20th century, a means of supporting the welfare of the people, a necessary and permanent evil for the greater good, and one that redefined the relation of the individual to society.

Dennis O'Driscoll has never been, as he himself says, "party to income tax work"; but his long career in the office of Ireland's Revenue Commissioners, moving from death duties to stamp duty, puts him, like Stevens or Larkin, in the tradition of "office poets" whose writing lives may be practically circumscribed by their civil (or other) service  the "toad work" as Larkin had it  but whose vocabularies and perspectives on "life" are unusually and productively enriched thereby. In Dear Life, O'Driscoll's ninth collection of poems, what might seem a vast chasm between a life lived in the evaluation of final liabilities and schedules of assets, and another lived in the service of the muse narrows engagingly. A sequence of three poems, "Revenue Customs", pays tribute to "dexterous drafters / of sub-sections, pluggers of loopholes"; in "Retirement" he acknowledges, with characteristically ambiguous precision of phrasing, "I could nearly hold the place / in my affections."

O'Driscoll often proves Woolf's point. Dear Life contains some not-quite-love letters addressed to life; the title is also an endearment, life held here in affection. But it may be read as an apostrophe too, of the "Dear God!" kind; and in the deliberately anti-poetic language of O'Driscoll's poetry, where phrases such as "outsourcing routine maintenance" and "interim trading statement" trespass ironically on the ivory tower's demesne, life is "dear" in that it comes at a price. In the title sequence of poems, O'Driscoll evaluates "the total / cost of living", forcing us to rethink an everyday phrase. "Demand for human life," he tells us, "is soaring. / Projections for the coming decades / forecast unprecedented growth."

The Christian Brothers of his home town, Thurles, apparently told the schoolboy O'Driscoll: "You will have to work for a living." And he has, finding his bearings between Yeats & co on the one hand, and "Acts and Orders Relating to Death Duties" on the other. Offering fresh perspectives on the lyric poet's time-honoured preoccupation with Thanatos, the poet has his own death duties to attend to. "Dear Life" also acknowledges "Dear death", as the poems confront the contractual obligation of every individual to "satisfy / the quota". Echoing Stevens, O'Driscoll acknowledges that to bring to poetry "worlds and words with which poets are rarely acquainted at first-hand" can be to expand its "scope and vocabulary". These are poems saturated with a language that wilfully exposes to us its (and by implication our) limitations the more O'Driscoll insists we hear it.

Yet the poems also brilliantly rework cliché and platitude. He risks overplaying his hand, but at his best, O'Driscoll gives the apparently throwaway remark a new lease of life. In a wittily disillusioned address to the "parents" responsible for "brokering my life", he concludes simply: "Where would I be without you? / You shouldn't have." In "Best Practice", an account (and calling to account) of Christ's life and death, the resurrection comes with: "And then, to crown it all, weren't / you sighted three days later ?" (If they would approve the poet's work ethic, the Christian Brothers might be more perturbed by the powerful poems here  "Last Stand", "The Power and the Glory", and "Our Father" among them  that address God's own final liabilities and, indeed, perceptions of God as a liability in an increasingly secularised western society.) While his poems seem to affirm that, linguistically, there is nothing new under the sun, that every phrase is a well-worn one, their insistent recycling calls on us to reassess the known, to rethink the implications of the language we use every day.

He is sometimes described as the "Irish Larkin", but the phrase does O'Driscoll both more and less than justice. If his inner aesthete and technique are less developed than Larkin's, the critical generosity that characterises his writing life is something his predecessor lacked. He eschews the Larkinesque seduction technique (that seamless move from "I think" to "we all think"); often, a third-person voice works to curiously distancing effect, and where one senses an extraordinary intelligence at work, "personality" is kept at bay. The self-effacement is also characteristic of a poet who, unusually, says he is "more interested in other people's poems than my own".

O'Driscoll, as an office poet, has been pulled between two different lives, yet it is not their separation that is his strength, but their dialogue. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Christ-figure he is drawn to in the poems, as in "Best Practice", is the one who balances "two books", who "wanted things / both ways at once", and who is "never more / lovably human / than in that / dithering spirit".