OF ALL the many projects this year marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, there can’t be many duller than On Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Bloomsbury, £12.99).

Editors Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann have invited 30 Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature — apparently “some of the best poets working in English today” — to respond in verse to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Between them the contributors have chosen to respond to 23 sonnets, the most popular being 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”), 65 (“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”) and 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”).

The obvious problem with the book is that none of the poems are as good as the originals. How could they be?

Compare Paul Farley’s take on sonnet 99 (“As I’m about to nick it from this verge/the flower sends a little shock to my hand’) with: “The forward violet thus did I chide:/‘Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,/if not from my love’s breath?’”

Andrew Motion at least knows how to write in iambic pentameter but some of the contributions, especially those by Robin Robertson, John Burnside, Jo Shapcott, Fiona Sampson and Nick Laird, don’t even pretend to follow the rhyme schemes of the originals.

Not surprisingly, the best poems are by those writers who, like Douglas Dunn, PJ Kavanagh and Alan Brownjohn, are skilled at using traditional form and metre.

Roger McGough has cleverly avoided the issue by writing a cento, a sonnet composed entirely of lines from different Shakespeare sonnets, while Simon Armitage’s response to sonnet 20 is written in Morse Code: “He loves him, He loves him not, He loves him, He loves him not ...” One of the best sonnets in the book is by Don Paterson (pictured) and is included in his new collection 40 Sonnets (Faber, £14.99).

It’s a lot of money for a very slim volume of only 40 poems, especially as devotees of the sonnet will find several, to put it mildly, stretching any definition of the form and some seem to have been included simply because they are 14 lines long.

But it is a wise and often beautiful book, inventive and witty although curiously for a collection exploring the form it contains no Pushkin sonnets, combining full-rhymes, halfrhymes and no rhymes at all.

Thus the quatrain of The Air: “What is this dark and silent caravan/that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;/that being never, has no hour or span;/of which we can say only that it flows?” And Funeral Prayer: “Today we friends and strangers meet/because our friend is now complete./He has left time.

Perhaps we feel/we are the ghosts and him the real —/so fixed and constant does he seem ...” It’s an uneven collection, but there are enough good sonnets here to remind us what can still be done with the form in the 21st century, notably The Self-Illuminated, The Big Listener, about Tony Blair, and the extraordinary The Foot, on the shelling of Gaza in 2014: “I have no words so here are the no words/for one who was playing football on the beach/ when you shelled it for kicks...”