Osborne is like a trapper going round the laid traps of memory to see what has collected there, making use of the pelt, the meat, the feathers. He's a spider, he doesn't force the pace. His poetry, more so than Love's, is related to prose in its grammar and pacing. It's heightened prose; Wordsworth's "life recollected in tranquillity".
Love's a hunter: sometimes a red-coated huntsman, enjoying the chase, already sated; sometimes more a sniper - distant, anonymous and ruthless. He's happy to throw away much of what he captures. Love, one feels, is less changed by the poetry he writes. He's like a chemical catalyst that speeds up a reaction without getting involved. Also like a chemist he seems to like working in a lab, trying to make 2 dissimilar substances combine by submitting them to extreme conditions. When he succeeds, he sometimes creates something new which shares few of the properties of the ingredients (as salt is nothing like Sodium or Chlorine). His poems often are experiments in the sense that he doesn't often seem to have a particular destination in mind, he just wants to see what happens.
Both deal with contrasting influences. Torn between concise imagery and sonority, Osborne produces verse of each type. Love lets contrasting styles fight it out within a single poem, juxtaposing or merging paragraphs, sometimes even mixing styles on a single line. Averaged out over a whole collection they address simliar concerns (Osborne more interested in Place, Love in Language and word play). It's on closer inspection that they differ. Indeed, Love usually operates at the level of small-scale detail whereas Osborne has an eye on the big picture using narrative instead of static structures.