"Forget all of that end-of-the-pier / palm-reading stuff" taunts the speaker in "The Power", the opening poem of Paul Farley's fourth collection, The Dark Film. "Picture a seaside town / in your head. Start from its salt-rotten smells / and raise the lid of the world to change the light, / then go as far as you want". No sooner has the poem urged us to build this Blackpool or Brighton of the mind than it has us knock it down: "the ornament / of a promenade" sabotaged by an arsonist imagination gone haywire. Yet in spite of its familiar cheering-on of poetry's world-making clout, "The Power" is unusual for sharing creative credit with the reader. While it cajoles and directs, it nevertheless locates poetry's force in the imaginative collaboration that takes place in the act of reading. "Now look around your tiny room", our poet smiles, "and tell me that you haven't got the power."

Getting the reader onside has always been a priority in Farley's poems. His first book, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), combined everyday speech with an adherence to meter, rhyme and forms, to draw us into a familiar world of telly, buses, vinyl records, board games and service stations made suddenly extraordinary. Its contemporary vitality invited lazy comparisons to the poetry of Simon Armitage, but for all the fireworks, Farley's poems struck a discursive, elegiac note that set him apart. Here was a poet archiving the past, but also the unfolding present: the "throwback" of a tin of treacle that brings us "face-to-face with history", or a minute's silence at a football ground that conjures "something of the Ice Age". A collection taking that epoch's name appeared in 2002 and, along with 2006's Tramp in Flames, saw Farley extend his formal scope to more assuredly evoke, re-imagine and dig down into (while also having a fond dig at) our cultural detritus and history-steeped cities. Collapsing distances across time and space, his poems often seem on the brink of what "Digital", a zippy piece from this new volume, imagines as "everything happening all at once".

The Dark Film finds Farley pursuing many of his staple themes  childhood, history, technology, landscapes and, of course, the cinema of the title poem's "unrated dark"  in a looser, more supple style. Yet with it comes a more cautious tone. His jokey ebullience is as resonant as ever: "The Queen" must be the most unabashedly funny poem Farley has written, as well as a neat commentary on the nation's on-off love affair with royalty, while a car's odometer in one poem is unscrewed by its new owner only for a folded note to fall out: "Oh no. Please. Not again." But where earlier poems often gestured as something beyond the everyday  in the mode of Larkin, an abiding influence  here there is a brooding, philosophical bent, intent on getting to the bottom of things. And not just figuratively: The Dark Film often tunnels underground, sifting through the strata to bring sense to the present's palimpsest. "Pop" imagines a future excavation unearthing "an aggregate / post-war character / dug from a beach that / was once five miles inland", while "Moles" transforms Orpheus, the mythological poster boy of lyric poetry, into a creature "cursed / with shovels that can't even hold a lyre".

Yet while a creepy poem, "The Cellar", leads us "a fathom below the floorboards" where "below doesn't bear thinking about", "Cloaca Maxima", a five-page sequence that opens with a haunting depiction of the ancient Roman sewer, clearly has other ideas. In the shorter poems, the electric jolt of a final line can seem to short-circuit proceedings; whereas in "Cloaca Maxima", Farley's technical sweep and switches in register have more room to get to the crux of the matter. It leads to the nightmarish realisation of "dreams / kept hidden, either by great distances / or the pearlescent blind eye that we need / to grow to keep the world under our noses / safely removed." The darkness beneath and beyond is not just what we hide or disguise, the poem suggests, but what we seem conditioned to ignore, shielding us from some unpleasant but necessary truths.

A related concern is our impact on the environment. "The Airbrake People" creates a fragile world of imperceptible yet seismic shifts; "Newts" seems a playful poem at first  kids fishing for pond life  but ends on a foreboding note. The Dark Film's success tends to stem from leavening this seriousness with a light wit and sprightly turns of phrase. "Cloaca Maxima" would weigh heavy and portentous without its slangy verve, also deployed to great effect in stand-out poems such as "The Milk Nostalgia Industries", where Farley both courts and mocks those tendencies that often define his own sensibility, and "Google Earth", which gives voice to the swift-zooming computer program: "Now I'm a hand setting the globe to spin, / finding a country, starting to zoom in / now I'm an eye. Now I'm a meteorite."

Occasionally The Dark Film indulges in the sort of tired laments for objects past that Farley's earlier poems, delivered with more inspired flair, avoided. But this hardly detracts from a captivating book that sees this energetic poet putting his livewire imagination to ever more ambitious use, all in an adaptable style that  like the elemental force of "In the Wind"  "stills us, or slows us down to thought".

 Ben Wilkinson's The Sparks is published by Tall Lighthouse.

Seeing things  in every sense  is Paul Farley's subject. Even darkness becomes visible if you stay with it, as the title poem testifies. A film of "Unrated dark, two hours long" develops character through small flaws: "a pair of tracks cut by a bad/ projector somewhere on the road/ from Soho leaves them mesmerised." Farley's poetry starts with  and stops at  nothing. The beguiling "Quality Street" is a child's-eye view through a rainbow of sweet papers, individually held up to the light: "The wrapper of a strawberry cream/ unpeels a vivid red to dye/ the evening bloody monochrome"

But it is back to darkness again that we revert. From coal ("The Cellar") to "Moles", darkness must be dealt with, and the mole is not making a success of it: "In this version of the myth/ We leave him there, helpless and blind,/ Skimming for worms in the topsoil, cursed/ with shovels that can't even hold a lyre." Farley is interested in how things work in the absence of art or a friendly lyre. He frequently returns to ordinary blokedom and to the nuts and bolts of things. Poetry, for him, is not a luxurious emergency service. He even invites us into a hardware shop to consider tacks and nails destined to "hold the world together". The resolve is always to keep it real.

He is wary of nostalgia. Many poems locate the child he once was (born in Liverpool in the 60s, he has lived in Cumbria and Brighton and is now in Lancaster). In "Nostalgie Concrete", he playfully reverses time  a lonely exercise. For, as he registers in "Creep", time is "a pulse running/ within the mainspring of a world/ that keeps gaining and doesn't care." That "gaining" is a brilliantly impersonal verb. It leaves us in no doubt that time's gain is our loss.

He explores nostalgia more entertainingly in "The Milk Nostalgia Industries" but in "A Thousand Lines" gives himself a detention: "I will not write nostalgic poems." A thousand lines are to be his punishment and this will be challenging  for Farley is nothing if not economical and knows what he has to say.

There are many striking one-offs here: a startling poem about burying his dog, a boxer, and having to break her leg to fit her into a small hole (couldn't he have dug a bigger one?); an amusing poem in which he despairingly imagines being the Queen. And in the wonderful "Adults", he writes about a child's inability to fathom adult unhappiness. He assumed grown-ups were "sole sovereigns" of their world: "So why did I find them at hometime slumped in their chairs/ or throwing their tea up the wall? Why did they cry/ on their own downstairs with the whole house listening in/ or plead softly to people who weren't even there?"

The most sympathetic thing about Farley's fine, hospitable, unpretentious poems is his belief in imagination as collaborative. "The Power"  an extraordinary performance  insists on this. But the whole collection is shaped by power  in several senses. There are passing references to industrial power (gas has a tremendous poem to itself) and in the original final poem, "The Circuit", he imagines himself "laid to rest" in an electricity substation. Electricity is to be his afterlife. He imagines it like this: "So you might think of me as the days shorten;/ a little shock each time you find you're sat/ in the dark, and rise to put the big light on."

This seems as good a way as any of keeping out the dark.