The judges of the £15,000 TS Eliot prize might feel tempted to count themselves luckier than most panels charged with choosing the winner of a leading literary award. Four titles on their shortlist of 10 are provided by the selectors of quarterly choices for the Poetry Book Society (PBS), which administers the prize. Each quarter there are also four recommendations. The judges are thus pointed helpfully towards a notional longlist of 20 volumes, while permitted to bring in any other eligible collection.

Does it make theirs an easier task than with other prizes? Not at all – collectively, they’ve landed themselves with a perplexingly varied batch. Tomorrow’s judging could prove a strenuous effort to decide between a poetry rooted in the UK and another kind registering the allure of foreign cultures; or between intellectual boldness and emotional introspection; or seniority and youthful promise.

Most senior of all is Edwin Morgan (1920), the finest living Scottish poet. A Book of Lives (Carcanet £9.95) is an astonishingly rich collection of shorter and longer poems, ranging from a challenging address composed For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament to an account of eating My First Octopus. There is a grisly yet ultimately defiant and hopeful dialogue between “a cancer cell” and “a normal cell”, and 50 poems (in a weirdly original stanza he himself invented) celebrating Love and a Life. Everything here confirms Morgan’s lifelong resource-fulness and unfailing readability. By contrast, a book not chosen or recommended by the PBS (the judges’ one independent nomination) is a debut collection, Public Dream by Frances Leviston (Picador £8.99). It leaves an impression of a slightly untidy, venturesome talent that has not yet found a settled style. But there is unquestionable promise in Sheep Skull and Scandinavia, and it will do Leviston no harm to have been nominated.

With Common Prayer (Carcanet £9.95), Fiona Sampson moves decisively from promise to fulfilment. Her latest (and best) poems develop a characteristically English modernist tradition of precision and delicacy when she writes about a beach walk, or watches reflections in a mirror or captures a familiar hospital moment: “All of us naked / under coats, dressing gowns, surgical scrubs; / the lift’s giant balance tipping us / Going up – / into our incurable / selves.”

After Sampson – and the rueful, neatly organised love poems of Sophie Hannah’s Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet £8.95) – how should the judges assess contrasting takes on the same reality as theirs in Alan Gillis’s Hawks and Doves (Gallery £8.95) or Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book (Picador £8.99)? Gillis’s volume, his second, is ridiculously promising. Enlisting the aid of MacNeice, the later Dylan Thomas and Larkin, he loads his Saturday Morning and his Sunday Lunch, his walk by Laganside and his hours Driving Home with cargoes of detail that seem all the truer for their manic absurdity. His could be the funniest book ever in the running for this prize. O’Brien’s grimly impressive collection explores a postindustrial landscape of privation and lost hopes that echoes with “the faint reports of spent economies, / Explosions in the ocean floor, / the thud of iron doors sealed once for all”.

Matthew Sweeney and Ian Duhig, like O’Brien, belong to an established middle generation of poets; but their angle on the modern world is different again. For Sweeney in Black Moon (Cape £9), present-day existence is a matter of isolation, imprisonment and suffering caught in a long series of short, sinister allegories. Finding dark comedy in this material is his particular trademark. Duhig’s The Speed of Dark (Picador £8.99) assails the current crusade for oil by satirising the values of 14th-century chivalry. At times he seems rather too absorbed in the medieval Middle East for the parallels to work, but these poems are as intricately erudite and wickedly inventive as ever, and this is his third appearance on the shortlist.

The Middle East also draws Sarah Maguire in The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Carcanet £9.95); she is justly delighted to have had a book published in Arabic translation. Maguire brings to subjects such as the bomb described in the title-poem, or Ramallah (sharply focused in images of “roads / stopping short // Hard-core and gravel / a job-lot of kerbstones // wires spewing up from snowcem”), the passionate care and concern with which she writes about nature and weather in the poems The Physic Garden or A Village of Water. In The Meanest Flower (Carcanet £9.95) Mimi Khalvati, who was born in Tehran but lives in England, is drawn back to the Middle East for its literature. She does not apologise for being determinedly Romantic, writing meditative love lyrics in a traditional Persian style, yet rejoicing in a debt to Wordsworth with poems about flowers, childhood and mortality where the gentle tone conceals an unexpected strength.

These 10 collections offer a daunting range of themes and moods in current British poetry, and probably guarantee disagreement about almost any eventual prizewinner. The judges will have a difficult day, but might remember that last year’s decision provoked little controversy. As one excellent candidate on an exceptionally strong list remarked, “Who could complain about losing to Seamus Heaney?” Morgan, like Heaney last year, would be a first-time winner of the prize.

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