Poetry: A true gift never leaves the giver

In his introduction to The Forward Book of Poetry 2004 (Forward £8.99), Peter Stothard regrets "a dangerous absence of reading among the learning writers", an assertion borne out by many of his poets' content-driven, low-pressure free verse. An observation of John Betjeman's is pertinent: "I have never thought one subject more 'poetical' than another, but have delighted in... choosing certain metres and rhyming schemes to suit certain subjects." Focused on what to say, too few consider how it might be said. Does poetry's brevity excuse uninviting first lines like "It is 3am, on a wet night, and I'm stood" or "There are no midges at this time of year"? And why do so many poets adopt a one-size-fits-all style and stick with it, year after year? If people tell you this is a golden age of poetry, ask them to quote you a few lines: not all memorable poems are good, but all good poems are memorable.

Thankfully, there are still writers who believe poetry ought to be a pleasure. "I should like my readers simply to enjoy what I write,'' is the wish of Christopher Reid (whose "Bollockshire" is a highlight of the Forward anthology). Reid and Betjeman are two of more than 100 contributors to Don't Ask Me What I Mean (Picador £16.99), a collection of poets' introductions to their work commissioned by the Poetry Book Society over the years and collected now to celebrate the Society's 50th anniversary. There are no poems, so it's a little like having sleeve-notes without the music, but Picador are to be congratulated for disregarding the bottom line; slim volumes sell few copies, what a book about slim volumes might sell, I can't imagine.

Peter Reading contributes a comically decorous piece to the anthology. His Collected Poems: 3 1997-2003 (Bloodaxe £9.95) includes yet more virtuoso poems threatening suicide or banging on about the awfulness of existence. Going On, the title of a book from the mid-1980s, now sounds like a threat. His work is an original blend of morbidity, grot, misanthropy, name-calling, black humour and sentimentality. Forty four of the book's 300 pages contain new material, which is irritating for readers who forked out around £35 for the individual books as they appeared over the past six years. Don't bother with the annual collections, the lesson seems to be, there's sure to be another Collected along at any time, though pointing that out makes me sound like the miserable git Peter Reading gives voice to so convincingly.

Exchange the Peter Reading for Roger McGough's Collected Poems (Viking £20) and you might expect light relief, but the Liverpool poet's work contains more dollops of grimness than his funny-uncle image promises; children meet with particularly nasty fates. McGough most often opts for a smash-and-grab aesthetic: get in quick with a neat idea or a cliche, develop it - "Some years ago the Rot set in. / It began in a corner of the bedroom / following the birth of the second child" - scatter a few puns, finish on a punchline. This is executed in a clipped free verse with occasional rhyme and a faulty space-bar on the typewriter ("thistime'', "nuclearage'', "undyingfaithfulness''). In a book of nearly 400 pages, however, the uniformity of attack compounds the gloom. But gloom has its place. Located at the heart of the volume, "Unlucky for Some'' relates the lives of 13 women in a Soho hostel, using their own words in 13 13-line poems; each one has identical first and last lines to lock them shut. A construct worthy of Peter Reading, it is a powerful piece, the outstanding poem of the book.

This year has been dominated by lifetime achievements. Better late than never, a new edition of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems (Faber £10.99) restores his ordering of the individual books. A poet who married a speaking voice to beautifully crafted verse, Larkin is one of the finest English poets of the last century. So is Ted Hughes, though, frustratingly, the many extraordinary poems in his Collected Poems (Faber £40) sit alongside doggerel for the monarchy. A risk-taking poet, he has about him something of Wordsworth, that other erratic genius. While the Hughes volume appears five years after his death, Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Faber £40) has been 26 years in the making. As prolific as Hughes though wider in scope, Lowell also took his writing through a number of phases, from the muscle-bound early work to the free verse of Life Studies. His formal schooling gives the later work its dynamism. By including many unpublished and uncollected pieces, Grace Schulman's The Poems of Marianne Moore (Faber £30) refutes the late author's own Complete Poems, in which the poet omitted nearly half of her published poetry. As her editor reminds us, Moore's terse comment was "Omissions are not accidents". Larkin aficionados were disgruntled when Anthony Thwaite did much the same with his first edition of Larkin's poetry. What will Moore's readers make of Schulman's I-know-best approach?

A remarkable quartet, these four Collecteds reaffirm Faber's position as the pre-eminent publisher of English-language poetry. It comes as no surprise, then, that two of the exceptional collections of new verse this year appear from the same firm. Jamie McKendrick's fourth book, Ink Stone (Faber £8.99), sees the poet swanning around with trademark panache. Including a number of sonnets, a haiku, and a translation in terza rima, these 42 crafted poems are arranged in a quasi-narrative beginning in the air and ending in hell. The most insistent motif of the book is eyes. Like the owls of one poem "weighing up the world and us / on the tawny trays of their irises'', McKendrick is a marvellously attentive observer: he notices that an ink stain is "black with a tell-tale edge of blue-black and maroon'', and likens a grain of salt to "the kind of roof a child might put/on a painted house''.

The underworld also features in Don Paterson's new volume. Landing Light (Faber £12.99) contains elements familiar from earlier books: adroit versification; an uproarious, abrasive, occasionally rebarbative manner; dodgy sex - "that parched scrubland / between her thighs breaks open into wet''; jokey admonishments which are, depending on your taste, vigorous or hectoring - "Relax! Things are exactly as they seem''; "you're not taking this seriously enough''; and a Borgesian playfulness typified by "A Talking Book'' and the third instalment of "The Alexandrian Library". Paterson expects his readers to make at least as much effort as he does. Fair enough. When he takes his own advice and relaxes, though, he produces his very best work. Landing Light contains a number of superb poems, including "St Brides: Sea-Mail", three persuasive versions of Cavafy poems, "The Landing", and "Waking with Russell", a memorable piece in which the poet returns the smile of his four-day-old son:

See how the true gift never leaves the giver:

returned and redelivered, it rolled on

until the smile poured through us like a river.

How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!

I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

In Don Paterson, Faber have a worthy addition to their remarkable list of poets.