My favorite boook this year was Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (Faber, £30/offer £27). Few poets equal his wit, those impudent internal rhymes and a lyrical music somewhere between nursery song and jazz. Bagpipe Music is an improvised elegy for all belief systems:

It's no go the Yogi–Man, it's no go

Blavatsky,

All we want is a bank balance and a

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bit of skirt in a taxi.

His tour de force, Autumn Journal, mingles disgust at English behaviour after Munich with his personal unhappiness over a broken marriage, and has an emotional richness that poets of political indignation often lack. In 1941, when the outcome of the war was uncertain, a poem, in the voice of an unborn child, concludes bleakly:

Let them not make me a stone and let

them not spill me.

Otherwise kill me.

His vision is blacker than W.H. Auden's, and this handsome volume will reinstate a reputation eclipsed for too long by his friend.

“I think of poetry... as a means of survival.” So Geoffrey Hill writes, in A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin, £9.99/£9.49), repeating the words of General Allenby in his wartime diaries. Hill is one of the few living poets who can be set alongside the giants of the 20th century. In his last few books, he has brooded over human evil and theodicy in the face of European suffering; here the weight of history is English: Cromwell, Milton, Wyatt, Burke. Inigo Jones's great arches are set inside the reality of 17th-century London:

dung and detritus in the crazy streets

the big coaches bellying in their skirts

pothole to pothole, and the men of

fire,

the link-boys slouching and the rainy

wind.'

He deftly transmutes the line of a Cambridge contemporary, John James: “The dancers, faces oblivious and grave” into his own solemn “The dancers face oblivion and the grave”.

No one has articulated the dilemmas of being a woman poet in Ireland with more poise than Eavan Boland. An early feminist, she wrote with her young children around her and made “woman's secret history” material for poetry before such concerns became fashionable. Domestic Violence (Carcanet, £8.95/£8.50), however, reveals other powerful themes: emigration, exile, the violence of Irish history, famine deaths, the intensities of a long marriage and the necessary stoicism of daily life.

Margaret Atwood is not only a riveting novelist, she is also a witty and inventive poet. In The Door (Virago, £9.99/£9.49) she questions the value of having a “head full of consonants like lovely pebbles”. Her tone is ironic, her metaphors surprising. A woman, perhaps a poet, perhaps a witch, who once had “a glare like winter” finds herself treated with a “secret jocularity”. The reader, taken on a visit to an oracle unexpectedly finds a tired sybil who confesses that she no longer has the energy to encrypt her prophecies.

It was my vocation, after all. My

fate. That and the lack of accurate

translation

“Who wants to hear it?” Atwood wonders as she reflects on a lifetime of dedication to the craft of poetry, before concluding wryly: “The worst is, now we're respectable.”

John Burnside's Gift Song (Cape, £9/£8.55) has an open, unforced music; a poetry close to prayer that creates its own shape on the page. For him, the soul is a matter of inner sounds, the memory of birds, or the dip of an oar. His epiphanies occur in the magic of words unexpectedly juxtaposed: “gunpowder, petals of skin, and the white of the eye”.

Fiona Sampson is a poet to watch. Her Common Prayer (Carcanet, £9.99/£9.45) calls up a city underworld, with stations like “wayside shrines/ on your journey in the dark”, and solid presences that “ground/ what flickers in you”. The darkness is of many kinds; the abandonment both erotic and lonely. Another lyrical voice completely new, at least to me, is Isabel Dixon, whose A Fold in the Map (Salt, £12.99/£11.69) has a powerful section charting the illness and death of her father.

Ruth Padel's The Poem and the Journey (Vintage, £8.99/£8.54) is a valuable contribution to any discussion on contemporary poetry. The first section is an insightful essay ranging from Classical Greek texts to the poems of J.H. Prynne, and the 60 selected poems in the second section are each analysed to bring out the subtlety of their resonance.

Bestsellers 2007

1. Surgically Enhanced

Pam Ayres

Hodder, £14.99

And still she goes on. Eat your hearts out Heaney and Motion.

2. The Nation's Favourite Poems

BBC, £6.99

3.The Odyssey

Homer

Penguin Classics, £6.99

3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

translated by Simon Armitage

Faber, £12.99

4. The World's Wife

Carol Ann Duffy

Picador, £8.99

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