The 13 books on the short lists for this year’s T S Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes seem at first unusually various: the Eliot list even includes — an intriguing departure — Tom Paulin’s The Road to Inver (Faber £12.99), assembling all his no-nonsense translations of poets ranging from Horace to Bertolt Brecht. Then the collections begin to fall into loose groups, not as a matter of age, or origin, or even style, but according to what the authors believe poetry should be about.

Ulster poet Michael Longley, in Snow Water (Cape £8), has some things in common with John Fuller, his contemporary but a very English poet, and with Colette Bryce, 30 years younger, with whom he shares an Irish background. All three practise poetry as a crafted, precise, reticent art, celebrating traditional wonders and satisfactions. Longley, like the Eliot short-listed Kathleen Jamie in The Tree House (Picador £7.99), returns to nature, vulnerably enthralled with birds, beasts and flowers, country scenes and seahorses. He makes tea with snow water with ancient Japanese fastidiousness. Dead friends are commemorated with wit and affection; the mood is one of mature serenity. In The Pear, “Someone has left three oranges and a pear / On Baudelaire’s grave . . . We have betrayed each other, we agree. / I love it when you link your arm to mine. / You eat half the pear and hand the rest to me. / The dead poet forgives the thieves their hunger.”

Longley declares that good poems are “comfortlessly constructed”, but Snow Water is a lesson in composure. John Fuller’s Ghosts (Chatto £8.99) shows similar autumnal contentment, conveyed with the dexterity and finesse of which he has always had joyful command. Yet physical ageing and mortality preoccupy him: restless sleep, creaking knees, haunting dates: he writes about his father, poet Roy Fuller, dying “in 1991, / A date of digital chiasmus / Not very frequently encountered”. Games invariably stir his fancy, and new poems touching on card tricks, ludo and chess are a delight. Alongside Longley, and Peter Porter — darkest of all the short-listed senior horses with Afterburner (Picador £8.99) — he is surely a serious Eliot prize contender.

In The Full Indian Rope Trick (Picador £8.99), Bryce shows the same interest in a fresh treatment of well-used experiences, including childhood fears and pleasures (here, in troubled working-class Derry in 1981). Stones and Last Night’s Fires catch that atmosphere in painful detail. The poem The Full Indian Rope-Trick implies that she welcomed poetry as a smart escape, but she comes back to earth with The Happy Retirement Balloon, a perfect small parable about the boredom of modern work.

Turning from poets who inventively rework traditional topics to others who believe in exploring new outlooks and new worlds (even new takes on natural history with Ruth Padel’s The Soho Leopard — Chatto £8.99), Michael Symmons Roberts’s religious poems in Corpus (Cape £8), on the T S Eliot short list as well as winning the Whitbread poetry prize, seem designed for an age of doubt and DNA (“this relic box contains / a hair curl from a child / to reconstruct humanity”). The extremities of the human situation are highlighted in a stark treatment of the body itself, in Corpse, or Post Mortem, or What Divides Us. Many of these terse, severe poems suggest an attempt to forge a modern metaphysical manner; but his invoking John Donne merely serves to remind readers of the energy and variety of those 17th-century poets. John Hartley Williams and George Szirtes, both with substantial collections and both up for the Eliot prize, each go on sending out poems that explore changing foreign atmospheres. Williams has long taught in a Berlin university. In Blues (Cape £9), Germany provides a springboard for diving back into England and also on into Yugoslavia, America — and Hungary, with an exuberant love-hate ode to its language: “a golden urine of the senses, / a glittering parabola across / the bunged-up barrels of the past”.

This poet’s fluent fantasy can run away with him; the most focused poems here are the best, and Fox to Earth, a deeply felt tribute to his dead poet friend Ken Smith, is the best of all. Szirtes came to England from Budapest aged eight in 1956. Reel (Bloodaxe £8.95) considerably enhances his status as a discerning explorer of two new worlds, England and the Hungary he later rediscovered. But all fresh experience seems grist to his mill. Sometimes he charts detail with almost too much fascination, but his technical confidence and resource increase with every book.

Two of the four Whitbread poetry choices are somewhat tentative first volumes. Leontia Flynn’s These Days (Cape £8) has whimsical patches, but there is a quirky honesty about her writing. In Ground Water (Bloodaxe £7.95), Matthew Hollis’s love poems never quite divulge what is happening, and the book is a curious mix of the fey and sentimental (“not even the leaves / can lay down [sic] with such gentleness / or be touched so lightly as by your touch”) with tough, capable pieces such as The River Drivers. The debut collection among the 10 Eliot titles is Kathryn Gray’s The Never-Never (Seren £7.99). It is a spirited performance — her poems develop in such a rush of detail. Assignation happens against a background of “a corded kettle, / thimbles of milk, the crisp sachets of sugar, / the PG tips, Nescafe.” The stronger the story and the less cluttered her handling of it, the better the result. Driver, The Wardrobe and Dettol Stings are all nicely mysterious — and fairly chilling.

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