Tara Bergin

This year a selection of beautifully produced and limited-edition pamphlets were published, marking a move by notable poets towards the independent presses.

Three I recommend are WN Herbert’s shocking and virtuosic Murder Bear (Donut Press), Desmond Graham’s eloquent Unaccompanied (Villa Vic Press) and Paul Batchelor’s The Love Darg (Clutag Press).

I also recommend two full-length collections — Helen Tookey’s strange but brilliant Missel-Child (Carcanet) and Nikola Madzirov’s richly lyrical Remnants of Another Age (Bloodaxe), translated from Macedonian and with an excellent introduction by Carolyn Forche. From Ireland, try Caoilinn Hughes’s Gathering Evidence (Carcanet) and Dave Lordon’s Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains (Salmon Poetry).

Tara Bergin’s most recent book is This is Yarrow (Carcanet).

Ian Duhig

Failed nazi and officiating doctor at Edith Cavell’s execution, Gottfried Benn would always struggle here.

As Michael Hofmann writes, introducing Impromptus (Farrar, Straus, Giroux): “Benn has no English admirers; unlike Brecht, he’s not even unpopular.” Hofmann’s electrifying translations bring a selection of perhaps the greatest German poet since Rilke before us in a manner that made me an instant admirer.

I also enjoyed Jen Hadfield’s Byssus (Picador), Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet), Miriam Gamble’s Pirate Music (Bloodaxe) and Liz Berry’s Black Country (Chatto). Ask the Moon (Hutchinson), Dannie Abse’s new and collected poems, is a monument to a poet whose death darkened this year.

Ian Duhig’s most recent collection is Digressions (Smokestack Books).

Hannah Lowe

The birth of my son means I’ve not read many full collections this year but grabbed poems here and there, often in the middle of the night.

That’s when I found an “embedded sonnet” by Phillip Nikolayev, which led me to his Monkey Time (Wave Books), where the traditional lyric and the avant garde sit side by side.

I’m always looking for poems experimenting with form and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street) was new to me and wonderfully various.

Another collection dipped into was Robert Hayden’s Collected (Liveright). Night, Death, Mississippi is probably the most uncomfortable poem I’ve ever read.

Brilliant too.

Hannah Lowe’s most recent book is Chick (Bloodaxe).

Sheree Mack

It was with great anticipation that I read Karen McCarthy Woolf’s first full collection of poetry An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet) after reading one or two of her poems dotted around in literary magazines and on the London Underground.

A collection created out of death, the majority of poems hang together as an elegy to her son Otto who died during birth. The pieces are beautiful and powerful as Karen connects with nature to transform her grief allowing her love for her son to fly free with his spirit: “My love is a bird who flies free.”

Sheree Mack’s most recent collection is Family Album (Flambard).

Richard Skinner

Zaffar Kunial won third prize in the 2011 National Poetry Competition and has only just published his debut pamphlet Faber New Poets 11.

Classical and graceful, these polished poems are to do with the gap between England and Pakistan — their worlds, languages and culture — and represent his attempts to redress this split within himself.

Richie McCaffery’s poems in his debut collection Cairn (Nine Arches Press) recall the tough lyricism of Ian Hamilton and the quirky world vision of Charles Simic.

The corners of McCaffery’s poems are wonderfully spiked and come at you from unexpected angles and the collection contains the knockout Spinning Plates.

Richard Skinner’s most recent book is The Mirror (Faber).

Kay Syrad

“The hay/smelt of how/the sky loved the earth. You were the pain in my ribs/aching/from the carts unloaded.” These are lines from John Berger’s Collected Poems (Smokestack), the first gathering together of his plain-speaking and often beautiful observations of working people, working life in the cities and on the land — and love — from the 1950s to the present.

Janet Sutherland’s latest collection Bone Monkey (Shearsman) combines exquisite lyricism, wit and philosophical inquiry: “Bone Monkey sprang to life./Three strands of darkness and a streak of light/were wound inside his head. His heart/made what it could of that.”

Kay Syrad’s most recent collection is Double Edge (Pighog Press).

Andy Willoughby

I REALLY enjoyed reading the hugely entertaining pop-culture anthology Double Bill, edited by Andy Jackson (Red Squirrel).

But I have been most moved and inspired this year by three books. Joelle Taylor’s The Woman Who Was Not There (Burning Eye) is a passionate, hard-won collection drawn from years of spoken word experience with an impressive control of form and dreamlike twist to its hard- hitting socially based material.

Hannah Lowe’s vividly imagined pamphlet Ormonde (Hercules Editions) excavates memories and the lost voices of the almost forgotten immigrant ship before Windrush. Joanna Boulter’s Blue Horse (Vane Women) is beautifully controlled, intense and erudite.

Andy Willoughby’s latest book of poems Sampo (Red Squirrel) is published in January.

Pete Mortimer

Portrait of the Quince as an Older Woman (Red Squirrel) is Ellen Phethean’s second full poetry collection and her voice has become more assured and mature.

Teenager is a splendidly concise summary of a mother’s experiences and neatly placed opposite Youngest Son Leaves Home. Julia Darling is Frida Kahlo lovingly evokes one of Newcastle’s best-loved poets.

Joanna Boulter is seriously ill and Blue Horse (Vane Women) is her valedictory collection.

The author’s medical condition may well have concentrated her mind for these are poems of real gravitas in the best sense. Dyeing the Corpse’s Hair shows just how powerful poems on death can be without being falsely declamatory.

A Poem for My Father at Ninety is a highly moving and honest piece, with its plaintive sense of matters unresolved. There is no longer time for posturing, only for a fertile and vivid imagination to be let loose on a final search for truth.

Pete Mortimer runs IRON Press. His most recent book, Made in Nottingham, is published by Five Leaves.

Mike Quille

Steve Ely’s Oswald’s Book of Hours (Smokestack) is an ambitious, organic collection of elegies, eulogies and other poems about the 7th-century Northumbrian King Oswald.

The religious format enhances the spiritual power of the poems and gives the collection a cumulative coherence and echoing, multilayered meanings.

They are strikingly musical poems, due to the use of archaic language and the convincing cadences of mediaeval speech that Ely imagines. Reading them sometimes feels like listening to a choir singing multipart medieval music.

Topical issues of identity are explored, of northern-ness and Englishness, not as exclusive geographical or nationalistic constructs, but as emblems of lower-class identity, distinct from the culture of the ruling elites.

They evoke the pre-capitalist life of working people and a sense of organic wholeness, destroyed by the various alienations of enclosure, the industrial revolution and globalisation.

Mike Quille edits the regular Soul Food column in Communist Review.