The point of literary prizes, I suppose, is partly to provoke argument about who the winners should have been. The Forward Prize shortlist for Best Collection of Poetry is disappointingly conservative: long-established names and only one woman, Sharon Olds. In what looks like a trade-off, there is an all-female shortlist for the Best First Collection prize; but that, too, has bizarre omissions. Here are four poetry collections that the judges missed.

Pauline Stainer’s poetry is repeatedly drawn to moments of transition and transformation; magic on the cusp of becoming science, or the present suddenly overwhelmed by the past:

A drover’s enclosure
where sheep browse
in their salt aureole,
and that subtler vanishing-point —
a centurion’s ghost
wading old damson hedges
up to the knee.

Stainer describes Crossing the Snowline (Bloodaxe, £8.95; 96pp Buy the book) as “the record of my journey out of long fallow after the death of my daughter”, but the collection cannot be described as confessional. Instead, we are offered a hard-won accumulation of signs and wonders: again and again, observation yields image, and image deepens into symbol. The process by which the world once more becomes available to the poet is translated into language with an incisive clarity, as here in Seahenge:

But memory is more pliant
than time —
those rings of sapwood
still harden into heartwood
as if the dead are
spoken for.

Over (Oxford Poets, £9.95; 66pp Buy the book), Jane Draycott’s third collection, is full of meeting places: hotels, piazzas, deserts and dreams. The Square is spoken by a tourist in an unnamed city, who realises that she is being watched by a woman in a window: “In her sleeveless linen dress she is beautiful,/ a cool candle in the vast dark glass,/ like my mother in a time before I knew her.” Is the figure real or imagined? Draycott has it both ways: like much of this fine collection, the poem is subtly disorientating, its atmosphere poised somewhere between Hitchcock and Hammershøi.

Uniform concerns a woman’s treasured jewellery, her “tear-drop earrings,/ scarab watch and timeless solitaire”. The following stanza could stand as a description of this gathering of poems:

She wore them especially at night
and saw how schooled in darkness
they had learned to catch the light
and keep it, adamantine, adamant.

Draycott is also “schooled in darkness”: she has set her course on mystery, and she has the necessary formal gifts to take the reader with her.

David Constantine’s work is exemplary in maintaining its dialogue with English and European literary traditions, while remaining committed to the things of this world: a lesser poet would choose one over the other. Constantine is also a master at playing syntax against cadence against line, and Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, £8.95; 88pp Buy the book) is characterised by its driving rhythmic momentum. This gives a convincing urgency to his expressions of anger at war and environmental damage, and an earthy physicality to the love poems: “My fund of warmth, inexhaustible, melting/ Her tongue and the lips and mouth between her legs/ So that the pair of us luxuriated/ To the fingertips . . .”

The title poem is inspired by one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Constantine describes a pair of drowned lovers on the sea-bed, while the Mariner’s cursed ship sails over them. The poem voices a tentative hope that their love might redeem the Mariner’s crime against Nature:

Love, luckier still, we shall imagine this pair
Nine fathom deep are dreaming
One dream, the hooves of nightmare are battering
Round and round in their encircled hearts
But they wake, they open, and the crime dissolves . . .

This may be Constantine’s rawest and angriest collection to date, but redemption and humanity are at its visionary heart.

Carrie Etter is an American expatriate, and her poetry is rootless in the best sense: it moves over wide-ranging territory and seems able to make itself at home anywhere. Although The Tethers (Seren, £7.99; 63pp Buy the book) is her first collection, Etter fully possesses her material, whether she is describing a purgatorial Midwest motel or alluding to Odysseus:

Before the boat struck rock, already I heard its wood planks
cracking, splitting, splintering and realised from your endless refrain
that the crash of bodies was not a song you wrote for me,
but the only words you knew. And still I sailed for you.

The central theme here is identity: how it is defined and challenged, and how it persists. A somewhat rarer quality in a young poet is the wit and self-awareness that Etter shows: Divorce walks a fine line between pithiness and bitchiness: “he remembers which sister/ I like least and asks/ how she is doing”. The intelligence and authority of Etter’s poetry sound most clearly in the title poem: “remember that we live by lacing between past and present/ stronger, straighter tethers than can possibly hold”.

Times Recommends

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