In the impressive and diverse shortlist for this year's TS Eliot prize (the most prestigious UK award for a new collection of poetry, now worth £15,000), Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader (Faber £9.99) is among the obvious favourites. Published after a gap of 20 years, Imlah's second collection, already the 2008 Forward prize-winner, evokes many manifestations of Scotland and Scottishness, not least the romantic and tartanised kind that have been set aside in recent years. The Lost Leader matches formal brilliance with a full range of tones, with elegy and historical poems to the fore. To sample it, read the elegy Stephen Boyd, or London Scottish, a 15-line sonnet on the annihilation of the famous rugby club's first XV at Ypres.

Ciaran Carson's For All We Know (The Gallery Press £11.50) tells a love story through fantasy and memory, building a shadowy narrative world in which 1970s Belfast blends into the cold war, the bombing of Dresden, film noir and the dream-city of Paris, all within an overall mirror structure. Carson, a previous winner of the prize, quietens his gorgeous rhythmic folk-baroque for a more tentative and considered line in this chamber piece: “I watched your lips frame a silent No/as the bomb went off at the end of the block and drowned all/conversation.”

Peter Bennet's haunting, spectacularly accomplished collection The Glass Swarm (Flambard £7.50) is set among Northumberland hills charged with eerie, ungovernable forces. The antiquarian curiosity of MRJames is combined with the zest of RL Stevenson. The effect is not to indulge nostalgia but to open an imaginative corridor along which several periods maintain an insistent, not always friendly presence.

Maura Dooley's Life Under Water (Bloodaxe £7.95) is fed by water at many levels. She praises and mourns the life-defining element in buried rivers, in a pane of ice, in a bucket of water run for the window cleaner, in tears, and in the ambitious closing threnody, The Source, with its refrain: “It is the breaking of the waters that begins it all”, a lament that is inextricably linked with a love poem for London.

Where Dooley builds towards myth, Moniza Alvi's Europa (Bloodaxe £7.95) draws on an existing story - the rape of Europa by Zeus in the form of a bull - in order to reapply it in the light of the history of power and gender. Where Dooley cherishes detail, Alvi is brisk and ascetic, covering aeons and vast distances in the turn of a line, while seeking to preserve the miraculously ordinary from the depredations of power and violence: “I would like to speak up/for the forgettable day.”

Alternately jaunty and exasperated, Jen Hadfield's Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe £7.95) finds the poet out in all weathers in northern Canada and Shetland, leaning sideways in a gale and studying a rock pool, gutting fish, watching the locals watching each other. The voice is attractive, the control discreetly impressive. With her bracing, salty, close-up celebrations, Hadfield might be writing a different language from Glyn Maxwell. It's not that Maxwell's Hide Now (Picador £8.99) is short of subject matter; the war on terror, Iraq, the flight of time and love are all in there somewhere. But it's a point of honour for him to tell a story slant, to make form tease and beguile, always to insist that poetry is made of language. At his best he approaches the folkloric quality of early Auden, while the songs from his plays indicate that his other master is Shakespeare.

Mark Doty works in a quite different tradition. In Theories and Apparitions (Cape £9), one of the apparitions is Walt Whitman, seen at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, “the impossible gentle manly visionary/of the eighteen-fifties, bowl-cut hair, warm lines around the eyes”. Whitman's leisurely, humane enthusiasm has a lot to answer for in its effect on poets inclined to confuse sententiousness with insight: Doty gets off to a bad start with Pipistrelle, which has less to do with bats than with how fine it is to be sensitive and to notice things. Fortunately the book improves with an injection of concentration and rigour recalling the meticulous stamina of CK Williams, for example in the excellent and energetically sustained Theory of Narrative.

It is by no means the least of these collections, but Stephen Romer's excellent Yellow Studio (Carcanet £9.95) is the kind of book that risks being overlooked when poetry goes public. Austerely eloquent treatments of lost love and the complexities of family are juxtaposed with reflections on art and poetry - exactly the civilised range of interests that might strike fear into the incurious. Readers open to Romer's scrupulous, passionate music and the conversational intimacy of his address will gather rich rewards, however.

Like Imlah, for many years the prolific Robert Crawford has also been re-imagining Scotland. In Full Volume (Cape £9) he is able to inhabit every part of the poetic tradition simultaneously, to embrace Gaelic, to keep an eye on the big picture and on detail for its own sake. In the title poem a diver descends into Loch Ness to meet whatever “flails and dwells/in inner silence”, hoping not to bring back reports but to “be lost in it...sung by it, not to be found”. That's a very fine evocation of the imagination itself: at once free to air and ultimately mysterious.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy