Old people are everywhere. There are currently more than 11 million in Britain over retirement age, 20 per cent of the total population, and more than a million of them are aged 85 and over.

These are large numbers, more than enough to suggest that old people should exert a forceful presence in British society.

Unfortunately, they are mostly invisible, except as problems (“bed-blockers”), victims (care-home scandals) or figures of fun (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, New Tricks or Quartet).

Three excellent new books of poetry help set the record straight.

Old Man Answering (Shoestring Press, £11) is Richard Kell’s 14th collection of poetry. Although he is now in his late eighties, Kell writes with the same effortless technique, wisdom and kindly wit that readers have come to expect.

He reminds us that in old age all pavements are treacherous: “Being good is like this I think… We pick our way, we dither,/Trying to remain upright/we’re also trying to crawl./If we’re out of luck our soles slither/abruptly and we fall.”

These poems are variously lyrical, grumpy, tender and conversational. They’re about the deaths of old friends, crosswords, hospitals and doctors, history and philosophy, childhood memories and bad news:

“Guilt? I didn’t start/the earthquake or the war,/want homes destroyed, blood spilt./And yet for days/I’ll have a troubled heart/as more and more/foul news comes flooding in./‘It hurts,’ you said, ‘because/all human beings are kin.’”

Kell is especially good at this kind of thing, praising the virtues of the ordinary and the sublunary.

He finds a kind of companionship on the number 38 bus: “Anyway, here’s a comradeship of sorts,/a bit of local politics not known/as that — nicer than what, preserved by courts/and armies, global profiteers condone.”

Keith Chandler addresses the consolations to be found in the company of grandchildren in The Grandpa Years (Fair Acre Press, £3.99): “You wobbling towards me/to be scooped up, kissed,/me sighing back over your shoulder/through the tickly wisps of your innocence.”

There are some nice poems here on the black comedy of ageing. In Old Man at the Gym he catches sight of himself in the wall-mirrors, “puffed out, man boobs juggling/without the benefit of a sports bra,/trying to keep up with that bronze god/gliding beside you, marking time/as on the eternal round of some Etruscan jar.”

But Chandler is best when writing about the invisibility of the old — “Look at me/becoming smaller, less significant by the minute” — and the title poem is a wonderful answer to Philip Larkin’s Toads Revisited:

“Any weekday about ten/you may see us drifting down the High Street/sometimes with a dog in tow/sometimes a pushchair out front… This is what we dreamed of all those years — /to Lear off responsibility. Now it has happened/we feel both relieved and disappointed./All that work. All that worry. What a fuss./All that ambition…”

Poet and Arrowhead editor Joanna Boulter was recently diagnosed with dementia. She wrote Blue Horse (Vane Women, £8) in the knowledge that she is unlikely to write another book.

Boulter is the heir to a kind of late English surrealism, always interested in exploring “the folds on the map,” and “the places/where reality creases and wears thin… a palimpsest of unexpected junctures.”

As she embarks for “terra incognita” she cannot help but be aware of “the missed tide./The shifting cargo./The season advancing. /The pack ice is closing in.”

The book takes its title from a painting by the German Expressionist Franz Marc.

But Boulter’s horse is both a mythological creature and “lame to earth” — “having once set foot above cloudgrey/he is back to earth again and earth/is ordinary/but he/has taken on skycolour for ever/and stands/dreaming/of invisible/stars.”

It is hard not to read this as a brilliant image for the aspirations of the poet, as well as a way of talking about the strange landscape of dementia. Best of all is the extraordinary The Road to Xanadu, in which she sets out into the unknown:

“Getting there depends on where you start from/and how soon you can get away./Then it is only a matter of putting/one foot in front of the other, and keeping/your eyes on the haze of the horizon/until, suddenly, you find you’ve disappeared/over the edge of the world…”