It is a good time to be a poet. Or at least, it will be a good time to be a good poet this spring, with two of Britain's leading poetry jobs falling vacant in the same month.

Bards will battle it out in May to fill not only the role of Poet Laureate but also the University of Oxford's Professor of Poetry, a position that has been held by Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. That becomes vacant when Christopher Ricks steps down at the end of his five-year term.

In the same month the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will replace the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who is retiring.

Motion, the first to hold the position for a fixed ten-year term (it was previously a job for life), has followed John Dryden, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sir John Betjeman and Ted Hughes. But while the Poet Laureate may have a higher profile, it is no secret that most poets, given the choice, would plump for the Oxford job.

The pay for both is insignificant. The Poet Laureate receives an annual honorarium of £5,750 from the Government, with extra for visiting schools. Also thrown in is a butt of canary (a cask of sherry), a gift from the people of Spain. The Oxford Professor of Poetry receives a stipend of £6,901, plus the odd £40 for giving a lecture.

But the huge advantage of the Oxford post, in many eyes, is that it does not require its incumbent to write about the Queen or her unruly brood, a task that becomes increasingly fraught with every royal indiscretion, and one for which Motion has at times been cruelly mocked.

The duties of the Oxford Professor of Poetry include a public lecture each term and an oration at the university's honorary degree ceremony every other year. There is also some prize-giving involved and the incumbent must also “encourage the art of poetry in the university”.

There seems little doubt that, if the choice for either post were open to the public in a television vote, the winner would be the writer of popular verse Pam Ayres — a choice guaranteed to horrify the poetry establishment, which has never forgiven her for writing poems that rhyme and scan.

Two other well-loved poets, Benjamin Zephaniah and Wendy Cope, have apparently ruled themselves out of the laureate job. Hushed conversations are taking place in university common rooms, publishing houses and literary festivals to line up the right poet for each job.

Such is the insularity of the world of poetry that some Oxford insiders are even tipping Motion as a candidate for the Professor of Poetry as soon as he sheds the laureate's cloak. Other possible contenders range from established writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and Derek Walcott to newcomers such as Jacob Polley, who at 33 is the poster boy in the pack.

For the post of Poet Laureate, Andy Burnham, the Culture Minister, is consulting at least 40 academics as well as literary organisations from Britain and the Commonwealth. He will then put the recommendations to No 10 and the Prime Minister will submit names for approval by the Queen.

Candidates for the Oxford appointment must be nominated by at least 12 members of the university's graduate body, known as the Convocation. If there is more than one candidate, members of Convocation will vote for a winner on May 16.

The leading contenders

Carol Ann Duffy, 53, award-winning and highly acclaimed poet, playwright and writer. On many school syllabuses. Considered very accessible.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

From Valentine, by Carol Ann Duffy

Simon Armitage, 45, playwright, poet and novelist, also writes for television. Senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Formerly a probation officer.

I am very bothered when I think

of the bad things I have done in my life.

Not least that time in the chemistry lab

when I held a pair of scissors by the blades

and played the handles

in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;

then called your name, and handed them over.

From I am very bothered, by Simon Armitage

Anne Carson, 58, from Canada, poet, essayist, translator and Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

I can hear little clicks inside my dream.

Night drips its silver tap

down the back.

At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who

left in September.

His name was Law.

From The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

Jacob Polley, at 33, the poster boy of the pack. Much fancied in every respect. As well as poems, he has written the short film Flickerman and the Ivory-skinned Woman with the director Ian Fenton. Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-07

What do I have for as near as damn it?

What do I sell but

I'm giving away?

Might I pick my own pockets

and slit my own throat

and dump myself dead in a shop doorway?

From The Cheapjack by Jacob Polley

Jackie Kay, 47, an adopted child of Scottish-Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Often on radio and TV.

I always wanted to give birth

Do that incredible natural thing

That women do — I nearly broke down

When I heard we couldn't

And then my man said to me

Well there's always adoption

(we didn't have test tubes and the rest

then) and well even in the early sixties there was something

Scandalous about adopting

Telling the world your secret failure

Bringing up an alien child

From The Mother Poem (two) by Jackie Kay

Glyn Maxwell, 46, studied English at Oxford and poetry at Boston University. Among the honours he has received are the Somerset Maugham and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York.

In the age of pen and paper,

when the page was a snow village,

when days the light was leafing through

descended without message,

the nib that struck from heaven

was the sight of a cottage window

lit by the only certain

sign of a life, a candle,

From The Nerve by Glyn Maxwell

Also tipped: John Wilkinson (Poet in residence at Notre Dame University), J.H. Prynne (based at the University of Cambridge), Jon Stallworthy (poet and critic based at Oxford), Frieda Hughes (daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath), John Fuller, Don Paterson, Ruth Padel, Derek Walcott, Fleur Adcock, Lavinia Greenlaw. One outsider, Jen Hadfield, 30, won the T.S. Eliot Prize last week

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