• Straddle by David Cavanagh, Salmon Poetry, 66 pages. $21.

In "Adam's Curse," W.B. Yeats describes a paradox in the practice of making poems: "A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

I was reminded of this back-and-forth between formal eloquence and the illusion of expressive ease as I read two satisfying new books of poems, David Cavanagh's Straddle and Chard deNiord's Interstate. They make good companions, read side by side. Both poets are what Cavanagh calls "in-betweeners," given frequently to what deNiord calls "second thoughts."

Chard deNiord, who lives in Putney, has recently been named the new Vermont poet laureate, and Interstate is his fifth book of poems. David Cavanagh lives in Burlington; until his retirement in 2014, he was codirector of Johnston State College's external degree program for working students. Like a couple of his previous collections, his fourth book, Straddle, is published by an esteemed Irish press, Salmon Poetry.

Both authors are men in their middle years, seasoned in their craft. They share a fascination with how sentences work (and play) across the staves of verse forms in pieces that are rhetorical yet conversational. Both of these books have titles that convey their authors' attentiveness to life's volatility, including the transitions caused by aging and the crossing of borders between places or states of being. And both books are particularly well paced, counterpointing ampler pieces (including several of the more beautiful erotic poems of mature love that I've read lately) with briefer exclamations, epigrammatic and compressed.

Any strong poem is a "straddle" between different levels of awareness, an evocation of an "interstate."

Cavanagh's poetic territory is juxtapositions and combinations: young and old, woman and man, to and fro, one and all. He's a dual citizen of Canada and the United States — "Canuck ... Yankee," as he says in the poem "Can-Am." He's dual in his artistic temperament as well, incorporating French and English phrases, for instance, into a poem recalling boyhood baseball games:

This poem, "Behind the Plate in Montreal, 1964," not only shifts languages in the boy's vantage but also swings between first-person and third-person narration in a way I've never seen done so nimbly:

Cavanagh can be funny and doleful at once, or tender and roguish. His syntax can coil, then snap, as in this first stanza of the poem "Now and Then":

In "Chimes," he immerses us so deep in sensory description that we may not notice right away that we are reading a single flexing sentence flowing in from the title, rendering those chimes that

Here's a brief one, called "Customs," thematically and dramatically characteristic of Cavanagh's keen-bladed wit: "Anything to declare?" / asks the border guard. / Oh my. Where to begin?"

Chard deNiord is a border crosser of long habit, too. And, judging from many poems told from the vantage of a car, he probably spends a lot of time driving between his home in southern Vermont and his teaching job at Providence College in Rhode Island. In the poems where his narrator is not in a car, he may be in bed (like Cavanagh, deNiord writes well of amorous awe) or in the woods.

• Interstate (Pitt Poetry Series) by Chard deNiord, University of Pittsburgh Press, 96 pages. $15.95.

Interstate has four sections. Nearly every poem in the first involves intimate encounters with animals, including an ornery colt, a pet dog that kills day-old chicks, a grouse and a doe, mating pigs, an enormous snake, and a bat in a woodstove. These poems are incidental in the sense of pivoting on incidents, but they work like parables as well, asking, What do we see, and what can we learn? This quality deepens and widens as the book proceeds. In the second section, the poems are like riddles, not ambiguous but mischievous and mysterious.

Over the past decade, deNiord conducted a vigorous and valuable series of interviews with elder American poets, which were gathered and published in a wonderful book called Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Conversations and Reflections on Twentieth Century American Poets. Most of his interviewees have now died, and several of them are eulogized powerfully and unsentimentally in Interstate. A particularly enabling presence here is the magnificent Ruth Stone, who is honored directly in one poem and implied in others, especially throughout the book's fourth part. In his poem "The Gift," deNiord channels another poet's own articulation of her task. The poem is presented in quotation marks, as though Stone were speaking in a voice overheard:

You hear the rhymes, lightly struck. Sometimes deNiord rhymes within the line, instead of at the more expected endings. Here is "Anchorite in Autumn," also an evocation of an old person, where the sideslipping rhymes counter what might otherwise settle into a nursery-rhyme gait:

These lines are slyly allusive, lofty yet casual and closely observed, roughened in texture by the staggered rhyming, which physicalizes the portrait.

Cavanagh's Straddle and deNiord's Interstate are agile, quietly intelligent and steadily pleasurable new books. Will they be noticed in the noisy frenzy that surrounds us? Yes, if readers read them.