by Jo Shapcott

Nightlife

Darkling, I listen. I can't hear
the ultrasonic tones and pitches,
but I can catch screams and whistles
crick-cracks, ticks and chitters
the all-night calls of foraging mothers
to their babies, parked on a high branch;
the clear syllables of passion, clicking
at a frequency to stir touch, huddle
and groom. If I had the nose for it,
I would understand the meaning of musk,
those rhythmic scent marks rubbed along
the branch, the gorgeous piss-gold for
self-drenching, for spraying territory,
for shouting to the forest I am I.

• This poem was commissioned for a new series of Writers Talks on Endangered Animals in ZSL London Zoo. The next talks will be Helen Dunmore on Sumatran tigers (Tuesday) and Glyn Maxwell on the midwife toad (20 June). See Jo Shapcott talk about the slender loris on our website

Palladium, London

The late Factory Records boss Anthony H Wilson was fond of opining that Shaun Ryder was the literary equal of Keats. By this lofty criterion, Salford's rival poet laureate, John Cooper Clarke, must be presumed to be operating at a rarefied altitude just above Shakespeare.

Pencil-thin, in shades beneath a riot of backcombed black hair, Clarke looks identical to his punk-poet heyday, but after years in the wilderness he has come back into fashion. Recent years have seen him pop up on The Sopranos soundtrack, as well as being given reverential props by erudite, current pop stars such as Alex Turner and Plan B.

His metier remains scabrous social commentary, poetic whimsy and surrealist asides delivered at teeth-rattling velocity, but the emphasis of his performances has shifted. Where once Clarke ran through his poems like hit songs, now his show is essentially standup comedy with occasional outbursts of verse.

It works because even this relatively conventional approach is rendered sublime by his mental dexterity and love of language. Riffing on The Blue Planet, he marvels at a TV programme guide that comprises "a million shark-accident channels, usually set around the Pacific Rim"; mourning his chronic memory loss, he ponders aloud: "Has there ever been an Imodium advert that involves a hang glider?"

Spitting vitriol, he shaves a few seconds off his personal-best delivery times for his pair of classic critiques of dysfunctional inner-city Britain, Beasley Street and Evidently Chickentown, before closing with material that recalls Les Dawson: "For my first divorce, we split the house. I got the outside." It's no matter; by now, Clarke's adoring fans will forgive him anything.

• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnGig

Rating: 4/5

Is the pram in the hall the 'sombre enemy of good art' as Cyril Connolly once suggested, or do writers who match creation with procreation find more success? Take a look at our survey of 12 key literary prizes

Tao Lin's latest novel could bring energy and excitement of Alt Lit into the mainstream literary conversation

Tao Lin's novel Taipei could, as Richard Lynch-Smith suggests and as I argued recently in Futurebook, be a game changer. What I want to do here is dig a little deeper into the "black hole" of Alt Lit and look at why crossover success for Taipei would mean a tornado of invigorating energy that stirs up a storm in the literary world and leaves it a richer, more nuanced place once the debris has settled.

In many ways, Tao Lin is a red herring. Arguably, he's no longer Alt, but in other ways he's the big thing. I'm not sure it's true that the Alt Lit community nurtured his talent and allowed him to rise from it. Tao Lin keeps himself somewhat aloof from the larger Alt Lit community, swooping down occasionally to cast just enough largesse to keep his acolytes happy, offering some the imprimatur of Tao's Muumuu House.

But Tao is not only the public face of Alt Lit, he is the lens through which Alt Lit is seen by the wider world. He has drawn up the tube map of Alt Lit and any prospective publisher will inevitably get off only when stops on the Tao Line are announced.

Which is a huge shame, because much of the most exciting work in Alt Lit – and the work the literary world at large most needs in order to be invested with new life – lies outside Muumuu's penumbra. Bret Easton Ellis is much quoted in discussions of Tao Lin. But one of the simplest ways to put it is that Tao Lin's books are little more than Less Than Zero, in which the drugs are ordered on iPhones.

As a movement, though – if it is possible to call Alt Lit a movement (I would say it may come to be seen as a movement for its uniqueness in making the digital world not just its medium but its subject, and letting the two iterate off each other) – Alt Lit is full of richness and energy.

One of the things I was criticised for in my piece for Futurebook was dismissing poetry. I did so because I wanted to look at the impact of Taipei on the publishing industry. And that really says it all. Poetry's place in a discussion of publishing has to be justified – it's a partygoer that'll be continuing to show its ID when it's drawing a pension. Arguably, however, what Alt Lit does best is poetry.

Whatever the success of Taipei, publishers and the media won't come beating a path straight to Alt Lit's most exciting poetry. But perhaps Pandora's box will be open just enough for all the Alt-evils kept therein to come flooding out anyway. I hope so, because Alt Lit poetry has the potential to deliver a shot to whichever arm performance poetry hasn't got to first.

At its best, the poetry of Alt Lit mixes three elements whose spread to mainstream literature would add extra richness. First, and most obviously, it engages fully with the digital world. Works such as Daniela Barraza-Rios's ♥ incorporate the rhythms, marks, and subject matter of the internet seamlessly – a far cry from Carol Ann Duffy's somewhat clumsy attempts to make poetry mainstream through text speak.

Second, Alt Lit poetry has a glorious confessional ecstasy that incorporates the primal screaming of the most vibrant abstract expressionist and the Beat poetry of the 50s and 60s.

This reflexiveness then shoots itself back out through Lacan's remade mirror in a moment of glorious jouissance – something that speaks to the one-dimensionality of some (but by no means all) performance poetry and the aridity and distance of much "serious" poetry. The finest proponent is Penny Goring, who uses words as fearlessly as Willem de Kooning slapped thick gobs of paint on the canvas. In fact, she utilises every tool afforded by the digital age to layer expressions on top of one another, image on text on video on reference on image until a 3D existential howl appears on the computer screen in front of you.

At the other end of the spectrum, much quieter but no less effective, is Paige Elizabeth Gresty, the salonista behind the first UK Alt Lit Spreecast party. Gresty is a video artist and poet whose tranquillity belies, and possibly even enriches, the complexity of her work, which uses subtle typography and image macros alongside more conventionally laid out texts to present a life gently being pulled apart by technology and disappearing down the optic fibres of fate.

Which brings me to the third element. Alt Lit poetry plays fast and loose with form, and is as much at home with image macros, screen captures and gifs as with lines of connected text. It is a movement that has taken the lid off the technological toy box and decided to have a proper play, pressing every button out of curiosity.

It is the willingness to borrow, copy, cut, paste, click and remix that may prove to be the most incendiary point of contact between Alt Lit and mainstream publishing. As long as image macros are reblogged on Tumblr, the precise images and text that have been pasted together playfully, creatively and pointedly go largely unnoticed. But if those who look after the rights of content producers make it their business to notice, the literature business might finally have the discussion about intellectual property that the music industry has been having ever since the Amen Break was sampled.

At what point is recycling the creation of something new – at what point does it cease being theft and start becoming a necessary part of progress? The mainstreaming of fanfiction has hinted at the question and perhaps it is Alt Lit that forces it into conversation.

All this hints at another box, outside of which remains Alt Lit. Head to the truly wonderful repository of experimental and Alt Lit The Newer York and you'll be hard pressed to find a .mobi or an epub file. This is a movement that produces ebooks as readily as it posts to Tumblr, but its ebooks are most likely to be read directly from a website or to be pdfs readable on or downloadable from Scribd.

This gives us a real freedom to integrate different media that would horrify many of the new generation of ebook authors, who fret whether they have the table of contents in exactly the right place for Kindles. And it might be this almost naive lack of awareness of what an ebook "should" be that finally helps to differentiate ebooks artistically from their paper-based cousins.

Clare Pollard's ambition to update Ovid's Heroides – letters from Greek heroines to absent menfolk – has succeeded wittily

Even keen classicists might have given Ovid's Heroides a miss before now: they're hardly his best-loved work, and outside of the trusty Penguin Classics, they have often escaped notice. The arch mischief of the Ars Amatoria, with its advice on where best to press thighs with a pretty girl (the races) and its metropolitan scorn for provincial manners, seems more modern, while Ted Hughes's peerless Tales from Ovidare entirely taken from the dark and shifting world of the Metamorphoses.

So Clare Pollard was right to think she'd lighted on an excellent scheme when she decided the Heroides was in need of an update. These letters from Greek heroines to their absent menfolk feel astonishingly contemporary, and unlike anything else in Latin poetry. Ovid's Heroines (Pollard's sensible translation of the title) have been abandoned and are desperate to make their voices heard. So we have Phaedra writing to her cold stepson Hippolytus, Medea to her faithless Jason, Briseis to the perma-sulking Achilles.

The letters are written in the first person, so could almost be theatrical monologues. Given that virtually every Roman writer whose work survives was male, we rarely get any chance to consider things from a woman's perspective. Ovid gives us that chance with these passionate, witty, sometimes heartbroken poems. He is acutely sensitive to the little-spoken truth that waiting for someone you love to return from dangerous exploits can be far more traumatic than being the one in danger.

So Penelope writes to Ulysses, who has spent 10 years besieging Troy and another 10 trying to get home. "Anyway, you've razed Troy, but what does it matter / to me it's been levelled?" Her interest in the Trojan war is non-existent once her husband has survived it. She just wants him home before the suitors – who have descended on the palace to try to marry her – demolish everything and kill her son.

Phaedra, trying so hard to be a good wife to Theseus when she's afflicted with an overpowering lust for the priggish Hippolytus, is beautifully rendered. "Please read this to the end," she asks, brightly. "Even letters from enemies are read!" Although she is desperate to show how wholesome she is, the truth shines through her pretence. "You won't believe it by the way: I have a new distraction!" She boasts about her newfound fondness for hunting before having to admit that she has only taken up this hobby because it's how Hippolytus spends all his time. Far from distracting herself from thoughts of him, she's mimicking his behaviour.

And those of us who dated before the existence of the mobile phone will feel our hearts go out to poor Phyllis, waiting for Theseus's son Demophoön to return to her as he has sworn to do. "I deceived myself to defend you. / I cursed weather for wracking your sails; / Theseus for holding you back … When sky and sea were still, I told myself: / 'He's on his way,' concocted obstacles." Phyllis eventually runs out of excuses for her missing love and kills herself. She turns into an almond tree, and when Demophoön returns (their story always reminds me of the film An Affair to Remember, but with more people turning into vegetation), grief-stricken, he hugs its trunk. Only then does it produce flowers.

Pollard is a confident translator. She's borrowed inspiration from Hughes's Metamorphoses, and gone for free verse. If she occasionally veers too far towards bathos, that's preferable to pomposity: at one point, Hypsipyle describes herself to Jason as inops (without resource, or piteous) which I think I still prefer to Pollard's undeniably succinct "bag lady".

The high point is probably the letter from Dido to Aeneas. Ovid had Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneidto inspire him and it shows. Dido is one of the most tragic figures in all ancient poetry. Her first husband, Sychaeus, was murdered by her brother, and then the gods conspire to have her fall in love with Aeneas. When he leaves her, too, she kills herself so she can be with Sychaeus in the afterlife. Even in what is ostensibly a letter to Aeneas, she reveals her true affections, "I come, Sychaeus, your wife is coming / and is sorry she has been so slow."

Critics of Ovid's Heroides have often disliked his habit of spinning a Greek princess into a Roman matron. But this rather misses the jokes Ovid is making. When Oenone, a mountain nymph in love with Paris, talks about scratching off her makeup in fury at seeing him with Helen, Ovid hasn't forgotten that nymphs don't wear makeup. He's deliberately humanising her: mortal women wear makeup precisely to try to appear more like beautiful nymphs. But Helen is so lovely that even a nymph thinks she might need a bit of slap to compete.

Ovid died in exile, booted out of Rome for what he described as carmen et error– a poem and a mistake. These letters remind us that he, of all Latin love poets, understood the plight of the person left behind, waiting for news. He knew that even bad news was less excruciating than no news. And this breezy, witty translation should give new readers the chance to share this understanding.

• Natalie Haynes's The Ancient Guide to Modern Lifeis published by Profile.

Amid the centenary celebrations for Benjamin Britten, we should remember the poet George Crabbe, whose tale of a cruel Aldeburgh fisherman inspired Peter Grimes

Does anyone read George Crabbe these days? How many people have even heard of him? In his lifetime (1754-1832), he enjoyed both critical and popular acclaim. Byron ranked him with Coleridge as "the first of these times in point of power and genius". Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott, Edmund Burke, Jane Austen and Tennyson were also admirers. But his reputation faded in the 20th century. Were it not for Benjamin Britten, he might have passed into oblivion.

Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based on a single chapter of Crabbe's long verse-narrative, The Borough, and as part of the composer's centenary celebrations will be performed three times next week on the beach in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk town where Crabbe grew up and which Britten made his home. Readers of the libretto, by Montagu Slater, will notice that a Dr Crabbe appears in the text carrying a black bag – doubtless a playful allusion to the fact that in his early life Crabbe served as a surgeon's apprentice. But the part is a silent one, and that seems sadly apt. The most famous line from Peter Grimes, the one inscribed on Maggi Hambling's shell on Aldeburgh beach – "I hear those voices that will not be drowned" – doesn't even appear in Crabbe's poem.

The drowning of Crabbe's voice would have surprised Byron, who called him "nature's sternest painter, yet the best". It would also have shocked EM Forster, who in 1941 gave a talk for the BBC praising him for "his tartness, his acid humour, his honesty, his feeling for certain English types and certain kinds of English scenery". Britten read these words when they were reprinted in the Listener, and came across a volume of Crabbe's poetry at around the same time, in a Los Angeles bookshop. The poetry was a revelation: "I suddenly realised where I belonged and what I lacked." He wrote the music for Peter Grimes on his return from the US and it had its first performance in 1945. Three years later, Britten founded the Aldeburgh festival – and invited Forster to participate with a lecture on Crabbe.

Crabbe doesn't name the seaside town featured in The Borough, but no one doubts it's based on Aldeburgh. Some of the descriptions still apply to the place today – houses "where hang at open doors the net and cork", marshland with "samphire banks and saltwort", tarry boats and rounded flints. Some of the holiday-making activities are recognisable too: "We amuse/Ourselves and friends with seaside walks and views/Or take a morning ride, a novel, or the news." Then there are the pubs:

All the comforts of life in a Tavern are known,
'Tis his home who possesses not one of his own,
And to him who has rather too much of that one
'Tis the house of a friend where he's welcome to run.

The humour and affection in such lines belie the ambivalence of Crabbe's attitude to Aldeburgh, a place where he was "very miserable and miserably treated". Pressed into medical training at 14 by his father, he found himself unsuited to the profession: perhaps the only perk was the ready availability of opium, to which he had a lifelong addiction. Poetry was something he wrote on the side until his mid-20s, when he cleared off to London, hoping to make his mark. But London wasn't interested. Letters to potential patrons went unanswered, and he was penniless, starving and in despair, contemplating "a speedy end to a life so unpromisingly begun", when Edmund Burke came to the rescue. Burke not only helped him find a publisher but got him started on a new career as a curate. There was only one problem: the curacy procured for him was back in Aldeburgh.

By all accounts, Crabbe – who was awkward and bookish – wasn't much cop as a preacher, and his return to Aldeburgh was far from happy. His mother had died, his father had become a drunk, and the town was unappreciative of his talents. He left as soon as feasible; a living was found for him in Leicestershire and he eventually moved on to Trowbridge in Wiltshire. But it's Aldeburgh that underpins his best poetry. There are glimpses of it in The Village, a poem written at the time of his curacy, which sets out to deflate sentimental ideas about rural life. And it is central to The Borough, published almost 30 years later, which resurrected Crabbe's poetic career when most people assumed it was over.

Like almost all of Crabbe's work, The Borough is a long poem, part-narrative, part-lyric, part-sententious moral tract, written in rhyming couplets – the rationalism of Pope infused with the Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. It's divided into 24 sections covering different social strata, trades and places. Towards the end, Crabbe tells the stories of four characters: Jachin, the parish clerk; Ellen Orford, a widow; Abel Keane, a teacher; and Peter Grimes, a fisherman. In Britten's opera Peter becomes the eponymous antihero, with Ellen cast as his accomplice.

With its parables of human frailty and tales of lives ruined by debauchery or drink, the poem covers a lot of ground. But it's the section devoted to Grimes that is the most dramatic. Crabbe's son claimed that there was a real-life original for Grimes – an Aldeburgh fisherman who took on a succession of apprentices from London, all of whom died in suspicious circumstances. Crabbe himself, in a preface to the poem, described Grimes as a man "untouched by pity, unstung by remorse, and uncorrected by shame". Even his name evokes "crimes" and moral "griminess":

With greedy eye, he looked on all he saw,
He knew not justice and he laughed at law;
On all he marked he stretched his ready hand;
He fished by water and he filched by land."

Grimes is brutal but, as Britten recognised, the townsfolk are also culpable in turning a blind eye to his savagery ("None inquired how Peter used the rope,/Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop"). It's only when they intervene, halfway through the poem, banning Grimes from employing any more apprentices, that the focus shifts. The rest of the poem records Grimes's descent into madness, as he is tormented by hallucinations, not least the ghost of his father. Though his sins are never pardoned, Crabbe's portrayal of him isn't lacking sympathy: "a lost, lone man, so harassed and undone/Our gentle females, ever prompt to feel,/Perceived compassion on their anger steal." Britten, too, allows him to achieve a tragic dimension.

To modern-day readers, Crabbe's treatment of Grimes, Ellen and others – a mixture of compassion and sermonising – points forward to the novels of Dickens. There are echoes of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, too. But some readers were shocked: "we feel our imaginations polluted," Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review, "and are offended and disgusted when we are forced to look closely upon those festering heaps of moral filth and corruption". As Neil Powell points out in his biography of Crabbe, the low‑life characters objected to here are the very ones a modern-day reader finds most compelling. And even in his own time, Crabbe's social realism seems to have done him no harm commercially. In his 50s, after years scraping a living as a country parson, he became a poet whom publishers wanted on their list, so much so that John Murray offered £3,000 for one of his volumes – a figure few poets could command today, even though it was worth 80 times more then.

Crabbe's last years were comparatively serene. Even before his wife died, in 1813, after years of illness, he'd begun a flirtatious correspondence with a younger woman, and several more romantic involvements followed. He also spent increasing amounts of time in London. "There comes in age an abstraction of self from those about us," he wrote, but he remained alert and active until his death at the age of 77. He could never have guessed that his Peter Grimes would become the basis for one of the most famous 20th-century operas. But as is clear from the closing lines of The Borough, he did have his eye on posterity and trusted it would judge him kindly:

"This let me hope, that when in public view
I bring my Pictures, men may feel them true;
'This is a likeness', may they all declare."

Anne Carson's highly original verse novel sends its hero on a poetic journey taking in everything from Len Deighton to flying cows

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, published in 1998, caused a sensation, a verse novel that reconstituted mythical Geryon – a red-winged monster – and Heracles and invented a modern narrative for them. A Canadian-born classicist (she has taught Greek at Princeton and elsewhere), Carson has a pile-up of awards to her name, from the TS Eliot prize to the MacArthur "genius grant". And she has pulled in an audience who would not ordinarily read poetry. Even non-fans would have to concede that she is an original. Her writing is wayward, entertaining and testing.

Red Doc> follows Geryon into manhood. He abandons his day job as herdsman of muskoxen and sets off on a picaresque journey that takes in a glacier, a psychiatric clinic, a volcano and ice bats "the size of toasters". With him on the icy road are Sad – his lover and a war veteran – and Ida, an artist, irresistibly described as looking like "a very tough experimental baby". Throughout, Carson disregards convention in a way that only a demob-happy classicist could.

Red Doc> carries this dedication: "for the randomizer". And a randomiser is what every Carson reader needs to be. She excels at departure from context. In the opening piece (not sure "poem" is the word), she shows how conversation (broken up by oblique dashes to indicate speakers) exists in free fall, has truant drive, need not be stapled to circumstance:

… could be too late for me to appreciate Proust on the other hand I'm at a loss

I've read all the Len

Deightons in the library/ hundreds of people visit his home every year some just

burst into tears/ Len

Deighton/ no Proust/

There is no telling what will turn up in the conversational dragnet next. "Lizard pants", Christina Rossetti, an ornamental deer, forthcoming surgery – along with Len Deighton and Proust – are all blowing in the same wind. And minimal punctuation suggests anything further would be a bossy imposition.

Conversation makes its own context. Yet Carson is equally good at situating people in rooms without talk. At one point, she writes: "Alive in a room as usual." At another: "Quiet ticking kitchen. It was the middle of the day." Or: "Ida is watching the room/ itself. It looks lonely a/ room needs its work." The poems themselves are situated in centred vertical columns – a computer accident. When the margins leapt to attention, Carson approved. The > after Red Doc was another computer contribution. The embracing of these quirks – just on the safe side of pretentiousness – is characteristic of Carson's playful lack of self importance.

And I have never read a poet where there was such a sense that the material was so unruly it might overwhelm its creator. It is this that makes Carson exciting. In a recent interview in the New York Times, she spoke of it being important for the mind to "move somewhere it has never moved before". This is what she achieves. She writes with spendthrift ease, shrugging off beautiful lines such as "the entire/ cold sorrow acre of human history".

Occasionally, the lyrical zaniness is suggestive of a more erudite Joni Mitchell. The book is filled with strange sightings – a man in a silver tuxedo who turns out to be Hermes, Ida pretending to be bipolar in a laundromat, a magnificent flying ox. If cows could fly… and in Carson's poetry, they do. But this is no fancy-dress party. And when it eventually comes, the death of G's mother is moving because of its casualness. Death, it is imagined, will "stroll" and the old crow is merely "shuffling" – the sadness is unmomentous.

A quiet portrait of isolated life uses coolly observed, ordinary details to build an unexpectedly suspenseful narrative

This week's poem "The Man" is by the Buddhist writer Maitreyabandhu, whose first full-length collection, The Crumb Road, has just been published by Bloodaxe and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Typically, it's a poem which seems to present a reassuringly ordinary and familiar scenario, while slowly making the reader aware that something unusual is going on. The images in a Maitreyabandhu poem may be drawn from life, and not obviously symbolic, but they're so arranged to denote a re-ordered reality, together evoking a sometimes dreamlike, inexplicable significance beyond the reader's initial expectations.

It's tempting to see the isolation of "the man" in the poem as the chosen solitude of a contemplative. But, if so, it's an edgy, distracted solitude. If this were a self-portrait by an artist, the artist in the picture would not be its whole subject, not a sharply-seen face, but a figure sharing the scene with other objects.

At first, we see him framed by the kitchen window. It's not clear at this point whether the view shown to the reader is seen from outside, or from the kitchen, or from inside the man's head. The view is not menacing, but disconcerting. It's as if the man had projected his own distractions onto the birds, with their nervous movements and "gestures of defiance". Somehow, all the birds in the poem, even the ladybirds, are emblematic, more than they seem, though their behaviour is not markedly extraordinary.

The pheasant is subdued, "his copper coat restrained". This may be the man's perception, but it's presented so as to suggest an act of self-control on the bird's part, a determination, paralleled by that of the setting sun, not to be picturesque. It's then we learn what the man is actually looking at: he's watching the ladybirds inside. We get the impression that there are, unusually, a lot of them – almost a swarm.

The man, as I've suggested, it not at the poem's centre. He's presented unnamed, the member of a species co-existing with other species. They all seem somehow to be caught between overlapping but inaccessible worlds: the ladybirds huddling by the lights and, in a startling simile, falling "down on their backs as if they'd taken ether", the nervous birds, the man who sits by the window and almost obsessively watches the ladybirds in a kitchen which, we increasingly sense, is not his own.

The middle stanza begins by drawing back to unfold a larger perspective of place and time. We see there's a field surrounding the house. Outside and indoors, time seems telescoped, one day merging with many. There are "always" the woodpigeons and the robin. The word "squadrons" gives the woodpigeons an uneasy, greyly militaristic presence. And though the robin's song might seem domesticated as it's conjured by the phrase, "as bright as teaspoons", the sweet, metallic sound so perfectly evoked is both joyous and a little menacing. Now time really speeds up. In a pair of beautifully economical lines, the sun rises and sets, as if seen through a time-lapse camera. The man is shown performing two simple activities, making two cups of coffee and taking off his glasses before sleeping. It's implied that these are regular activities. What else does he do? Does he eat? Is he fasting? Perhaps the poet has chosen to focus on those particular rituals because they are central to the man's sense of identity.

"Nothing/happened inside the house." Like a prisoner, the man goes out for exercise. He "walked around/the garden with his scarf around his neck". The repetition of "around" evokes entrapment. The robin and the scarf-wearing suggest the season is winter (perhaps the ladybirds were seeking places to hibernate?) All the details, so sharply observed, heard, tasted and felt, add up to a repetitive cycle which has a faintly desperate quality about it. Philip Larkin's question, "Where can we live but days?" comes to mind.

The human "signs of life" the man wishes for are auditory, and seem very quiet and intimate, particularly "the sound of someone … slipping on a jacket." These wishes might be memories, rather than the imagining of what another's presence might be like. When I first read the poem, I wondered if the man had lost a loved partner or close friend. But this stanza doesn't actually rule out another presence. It may be one which lacks discernible "signs of life". The man may be deluded about what is and isn't alive or present.

The brightness of the sunlit kettle recalls the robin's song earlier. The "patch of sunlight" seems to move fast ("swivelled") while the man ceases to move much at all. He "lay down and wrote inspiring things/on little scraps of card". Perhaps the reader should resist the temptation to mutter, "Aha. He's a poet." There's no certainty that the inspiring things are poems. The man may be writing anything, the judgment purely subjective. "Inspiring" is a word which tends to carry an ironic undertone.

The man no longer looks or goes outside. He imagines the sounds of the creatures beyond the house, but isn't sure if he's really heard them. The last line-and-a-half close the narrative abruptly and dramatically, the point of no return emphasised by the distant "spout/out" rhyme. Suddenly, the man is without the basic means of survival. He may be a practicing ascetic, but he will be forced to confront anew his human vulnerability. The poem simply says what happened: the man is now out of the picture. The reader supplies the gasp of dismay. But what if it's the moment of liberation?

The poem's slow tempo, its relaxed but precise diction, and the detached yet not unsympathetic manner, grounded in the use of the third-person perspective, create a mood of possibility, not necessarily negative. Importantly, the narrative is in the past tense. This helps build suspense, and adds a flavour of parable. It's impossible to read the poem without sharing the solitary man's own heightened perception. Even at the end, I felt obscurely that I wanted to go living in the poem and sharing the experience, however extreme it had become.

Both alert and bored, a creature of habit and of patient vision, "the man" is everyman. His story could be one that takes place in the future, at the moment when human civilisation begins to crumble. He may die or he'll go on, as Auden said, "To further griefs, and greater,/ And the defeat of grief." Beyond his lifespan, there will still be birds and animals, nights and days. Or so the poem encourages us to hope.

The Man

The man was sitting by the kitchen window.
Outside, the trees were full of nervous birds,
nodding their heads or flicking up their tails
in gestures of defiance. A pheasant walked
along a hedge, his copper coat restrained,
even the sun held back behind the trees.
The man was watching ladybirds climb up
the windowpane: so many on the walls,
so many huddled near the lights! They fell
down on their backs as if they'd taken ether.

The house stood in the corner of a field
with woodpigeons, always woodpigeons, in twos
or squadrons in the trees; and a robin singing
from a post, his song as bright as teaspoons.
The sun rose in pale and broken stripes,
then set in a perfect orange ball. Nothing
happened inside the house. The man took off
his glasses when he slept, drank two strong cups
of coffee every day, and walked around
the garden with his scarf around his neck.

He wanted signs of life: the sound of someone
closing a drawer or slipping on a jacket;
but no-one pressed the gravel drive or opened
the kitchen door. A patch of sunlight swivelled
round the room, brightening the kettle's spout.
The man lay down and wrote inspiring things
on little scraps of card. He thought he heard
a hare snuffling in the grass, an owl
hooting in the night. But then the taps
ran dry and the blue pilot light went out.

My father, Patrick Wakeling, who has died aged 84, was an innovative child psychiatrist and a keen poet. Patrick was one of a group of professionals who helped shape the child guidance clinics of the 1970s. The new, and successful, idea was to see a child's problems within the context of wider family dynamics. He also worked at the Lawn hospital, Lincoln, where children could stay in residential accommodation, with or without their parents. These units were supported by teams of psychologists, social workers, nurses and teachers.

Born in Rochester, Kent, where he enjoyed a happy and free childhood, Patrick won a place at University College, Galway (now the National University of Ireland), to study medicine. Having completed his national service, he headed off to London for an interview about a much-needed grant. Sweating and nervous, he recounted how the officer simply sat him down and said: "You'll love Galway. I've been fishing there."

He met and, in 1957, married Vivienne in Dublin and worked in various parts of England as a doctor – bringing with him an expanding family – before becoming a consultant child psychiatrist for the Trent regional health authority in Lincoln.

My brothers and sisters and I never really knew what our father did for a living: psychiatrist is a big and mysterious word to a child. He was a literary and philosophical man, and we were often tempted to try to find clues about his professional life in academic books, but it was in poetry, which he wrote and published throughout his life, that his true take on the world was revealed.

In the poem The Day the School Burned Down, he is standing next to a policeman surveying the ruins of the building: "The policeman said he was appalled. I said nothing, but saw that schools could actually be destroyed." Heartening news for many schoolchildren the world over.

Patrick is survived by Vivienne, five children – me, Julian, Aubrey, Sylvia and Melissa – and three grandchildren.

Whether through crowded airports or in the silence of your imagination, this is a month to travel. Time to set off with a pen

Summer time and the living is mobile. Once July arrives, many of us have hit, are about to hit, or are wondering if we can afford to hit the road. Be it a midweek break in Paris, a fortnight by the sea or three months on a J-1 visa in New York, summer is the time for travel. According to Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about the subject, it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive; for the next few weeks you are invited to test the hypothesis that it is better to travel in poetry than by public transport.

One of the great pleasures of any journey is the possibility of the unexpected encounter or experience. You turn a corner and suddenly the most dramatic panorama you've ever seen stretches out before you. You walk into a bar in a city you've never been in before and there they are, the lost love of your life and you think "we'll always have Paris"… Or maybe it's a bus trip on a moonlit night when suddenly a great animal wanders out onto the road, a moose perhaps– as in Elizabeth Bishop's account – delaying the journey but bringing its ineffable gift of joy to ease the way.

Of course, the encounters you have along the way will depend on the choices you make, the road you take, or the road not taken. Frost's poem is so familiar that it's easy to overlook quite how laden with paradox it is; both roads are worn "really about the same", and yet the speaker is happy to claim that picking the less worn one "made all the difference". How does he or she know? Maybe it's just the condition of journeying that we cannot know what might have happened if we had gone another way, made a different decision.

At least the travellers depicted by Bishop and Frost were paying attention to their surroundings, unlike those holidaymakers we've all met who see their trips at second hand through a viewfinder. It's a phenomenon that is neatly captured by Wendell Berry in his poem The Vacation with the observation that while the camera-wielding holidaymaker will be able to view his journey at will, he himself will "never be in it'" And that was before the advent of digital mobile technology.

Nobody could accuse the speaker in Anne Sexton's Crossing the Atlantic of not being in her voyage. She is immersed fully in every aspect of life on her floating city on a journey eastwards through both space and time, back through the generations of female ancestors who made the reverse trip before her. There's something in the energy of this poem that reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, as memorably translated by Ezra Pound. Unlike Sexton's poem, however, The Seafarer is the ultimate expression of travel as expulsion, of the outcast who roams without choice and with no ultimate destination available to them. Here's hoping none of us ever have to endure anything like it.

Whatever Stevenson might say, most of our journeys do have destinations and we generally hope to get there eventually. Mind you, not many arrivals are at events that have the momentous consequences that attended the end point of The Journey of the Magi or as big a let-down as the unresponsive silence that greeted, or failed to greet, Walter De La Mare's traveller at what turned out to not quite mark the end of his wanderings. Reading poems like this might make you more sympathetic to Charles Tomlinson's "These days are best when one goes nowhere" in his poem Against Travel.

And so this month's Poster Poems challenge is on the theme of journeys; long or short, arduous or luxurious, focused on the going or the arriving, your traveller's tales are welcome here. We're off on a trip around the egg of the world.

Spending time with this collection's rich but melancholy modesty will enrich the reader's attention

Maitreyabandhu, as his name indicates, is a Buddhist, and his Way commends the value of mindfulness. In "Afterwards", Thomas Hardy, watching the moment when "the May month flaps its glad green hands like wings", hoped to be remembered as "a man who noticed such things". Maitreyabandhu is interesting for being one who notices, and for the care he brings to his observations of people, events, places and memories. But unlike Hardy and most other poets, he is inclined to be self-effacing, even when writing about himself.

He also differs from Hardy in finding that memory, while it haunts us, is necessarily an imperfect faculty. The recognition of this forbids him the consolation of the completed story. Instead he must content himself with being truthful about where certain recollection ends, and with avoiding the understandable temptation to shape and improve on its blanks and time-slips. Above all, there is to be no yearning after more than circumstances permit.

In its quiet way, this is an intimidating discipline, but there's humour in it, too. "The Coat Cupboard" stands open like a come-on to the poet, full of touch and scent and memory of the family, but "You don't push your way through to discover a landscape / where beavers can talk; you're not reunited with your lover / coming around the headland in a ship – your face / is pressed against lambswool and the smell of camphor, / ink and dogs."

This, though, is unavoidably in part a creation itself, an idea that recurs when, in "Burial", an altogether grimmer smell is encountered: "My father was digging below the lilac trees / when his spade broke the crown of a buried skull. // The stench, he told me, clambered through his chest, / then through his head, like a shirking ghost." It would be quite something to have a father so gifted in horrible evocation. The poet adds: "I've made it up or rather I've mistaken / my father's story for the thing itself: // the smell, the wormy skull, the policeman / tall, bright-buttoned, standing by the Aga." Untelling the story like this does nothing to cancel the stench, which transmits itself to the reader's imagination like a sort of sensory curse passed on in the telling: whatever "real" means, this is surely part of it.

The poet's father, devoted to bottle-digging and other unearthings, is a loved presence, seen in action rather than characterised. When he allows his son to be cheated out of an excavated cottage-shaped ink-bottle by a dealer, it's a shock, but it makes a stern kind of sense in the light of "Hammers", which deals with another of his father's interests – buying and refurbishing unwanted tools bought "at car boot sales and garage sales and farms: / claw hammer, tack hammer, the ornate / toffee hammer with the tiny pickaxe head". In some cases he seems, almost, to be replacing the actual tool with its original self, before leaving "each hammer to marinade for weeks / in linseed oil wrapped up in plastic bags". It's a craft, in some sense an art, work done out of reverence for craftsmanship, and finally a ritual preparation of a form of grave-goods.

"Stephen", which closes the collection, is a sequence of 21 poems about an adolescent love affair with a local boy. In a curious way, Maitreyabandhu's disposition to take himself out of the picture seems very suited to this intensely autobiographical work. He doesn't allow himself to get sentimentally in his own light or to pull focus from a sober, deeply felt effort of recollection and recreation. "Two boys once walked across an iron bridge, / one taller than the other. They didn't speak / or catch each other's eye. The brook they crossed // was finger-deep and running over pebbles, / it sounded like someone filling in a form, / writing all the answers with a pencil." The affair, conducted in the woods and fields of Warwickshire in the 1970s, remains unknown to anyone but the boys, who themselves remain largely unknown to each other, their relationship in a sense a secret even from themselves.

The remembered facts may be unreliable or simply incomplete, but these conditions are viewed not as problematic but the grounds of the poems themselves: "If I can't remember […], Stephen /…,/ then let me fold you in these white sheets." It seems that Stephen has drifted away and begun to mix more with girls, when a tragedy occurs: "It was around the start of autumn, the air / had that sudden softness, leaves were turning – / he'd been waiting to do something with his life / when someone screamed as a woman we both knew / turned right and knocked him off his bike."

This is not the final poem. Instead the sequence makes its way back to this point via lovemaking, an imagined future, a glimpse of "you, / climbing up the kitchen stairs, naked / on your hands and knees, and me following" until the fatal accident "between Beaudesert Lane and the High Street", while the poet walked past to take an art exam. Sorrow is allowed to be itself. The Crumb Road has a rich, melancholy modesty, and to spend time with it enriches our attention.

• Sean O'Brien's Collected Poems is published by Picador

by Rob A Mackenzie

The point is to repeat. To repeat the point,
the point is worth repeating, even if not:
we need to stick by the manual, even if useless,
to talk about how we think the things we've thought.

The point is worth repeating, even if not
worth retweeting. We cannot trust ourselves
to talk about how we think the things we've thought.
Our independence, our politics, our fitting demise

are not worth retweeting. We cannot trust ourselves
to train a parrot. We need experts to refine
our independence, our politics, our fitting demise,
like the Prime Minister and his unlikeable sidekick.

To train a parrot, we need experts to refine
our received pronunciation. Repeat after me,
"We like the Prime Minister and his unlikeable sidekick" –
not to sound desperate, but sing fortissimo, with comedy

in received pronunciation. Repeat after me,
as the point is to repeat, to repeat the point,
not to sound desperate. Sing fortissimo, with comedy,
we need to stick by the manual, even if useless.

• From The Good News, published by Salt Publishing, RRP £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or visit the Guardian bookshop

The pain of nursing and losing a sick baby inspired the poet to write a collection which has earned her a place on the Forward poetry prize shortlist

Rebecca Goss knew that locking up an empty house and moving away should not be this hard. Yet when she finally turned her back on her old front door in Liverpool last week, she was racked with sorrow.

The 38-year-old poet has enjoyed much of her life in the city, so a little sadness was to be expected. Her overriding feeling, though, was that she was letting go of powerful memories of the place where she had cared for her sick baby daughter, Ella.

"Leaving Liverpool is one of the worst things I have had to do," said Goss this weekend, on the eve of the announcement that she will appear on the prestigious shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry.

"It really was incredibly hard to go, almost as bad as when Ella died. Because of everything that had happened there; happy things and some very sad. All my belongings were going into storage too."

Goss was heading for Suffolk, where she grew up and where she and her husband will make what she describes as "a complete new start" in a 17th-century cottage, close to the places she knew as a child. By chance, the move has coincided with intense literary interest in her newly finished poems about the illness and eventual loss of Ella after 18 months of life. Goss knows the unveiling of the shortlist on Monday will bring a fresh period of focus on the pain of her recent experiences. She is braced, she says.

The book Her Birth, published this month, is her second collection but the first to propel her work into the top rank of poets working in Britain and Ireland. "I realise I am the name on the list that no one will know, so it means a huge amount to me that the judges felt it should be there," she said.

Her plain, spare writing is proof that the specifics of individual impressions can connect with readers who may know nothing of the unhappiness and stress of dealing with a baby who has been diagnosed with a rare heart problem and then clutches on to life much longer than any doctor predicts.

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One of the characteristically clear poems in the book deals with the impact of being led by hospital staff into a suspiciously cosy room.

"No tabloids, no vending cups, no debris

of the bored and hungry. Instead

carpet, fireplace, neat homely items.

This is not the room where you wait for news,

this is the room where you are told it."

The impact of this poem was clear at a recent reading given to paediatricians, nurses and bereavement counsellors. "It was very different to reading to the sort of people who usually come to hear poetry," said Goss. "Several of them said afterwards they often wonder about the look of the rooms they use to give bad news. It is good to find you have seen something. When I read Toast, my poem about forcing myself to eat in hospital, someone told me they had just taken a call from someone trying to explain the same thought."

As a child in Suffolk, Goss shared her parents' interest in books and remembers being prompted to write her own poems when her father read her the Seamus Heaney poem, Trout.

An early attempt to write a sestina at school won her the WH Smith Prize for young writers. With private determination, Goss settled on becoming a poet after studying English at John Moores University in Liverpool. She married a widower and helped look after his two children, teaching at the university and writing whenever she could. Her first book, The Anatomy of Structures, was a collection of narrative poems, largely fictional. The birth of Ella then threw everything into a different gear.

The new poems, which Goss calls her Ella Poems, were written to address the emotions of the months she spent in and out of hospital with her daughter and her burgeoning hopes for a new life now. Setting out on the book, it was a while before Goss saw the collection as a whole.

"I sent off the poems separately and so it was only later I started to see it that way," she said. "One evening my father asked me what the book was about, which was a strange question when he knew I was writing about Ella, and I said, 'I think it is a book about bereavement'."

The collection follows a great tradition of English-language elegies, right back to the anonymous Middle English poem Pearl, which mourns a young girl with the words "Earth, you have marred her purity", and then the idealisation of Wordsworth's Lucy Poems, all devoted to the loss of a mystery child ("The floating clouds their state shall lend / To her; for her the willow bend").

In recent times the valedictory poems in Sharon Olds's The Father, Christopher Reid's A Scattering and Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters have also been acclaimed.

Goss was wary of seeing herself joining any sort of literary lineup, however.

"It felt much more personal and I couldn't see where it would fit in," she said. The poet concentrated instead on communicating her observations, for example, about the mixed emotions felt when entering hospital. "When I used to go in the door of Alder Hey with Ella, a part of me used to think, 'Good. I am safe now and the real world can't get to me here'. But I also knew I was there because Ella was ill again."

And there are dual emotions to deal with even today, after the happy birth of second daughter Molly, now a toddler.

"I do feel a bit nauseated when I read about mothers who are having this idyllic time ... I find all their expectations difficult: the fact they think it is all going to be all right. It is jealousy really, although I am not a jealous person by nature. If I see a mother with two girls I sometimes think, 'Oh, I was meant to have that'."

During her second pregnancy, Goss found it hard to socialise with other mothers-to-be. "I couldn't go to antenatal classes because I had heard it all already. I thought I could go to baby singing groups once Molly was born, but I was far too emotional. I found it difficult when people asked me, as they do, if this was my first baby."

As a result, Goss stayed at home with her new daughter and "valued every second. It was just me and Molly hanging out. It was exactly the right thing to do because I really got to know her."

She finished the collection during this period, putting housework on hold. "I really only had Molly's nap times to work. Sometimes I felt I should just be grateful to have Molly, but I knew that the book should not drag on long into Molly's life. I have lots of friends who juggle work and parenthood, so I guess it is the same for them. Anyway, I am used to storing up ideas in my head for later and I have a very supportive husband."

Molly has recently called her mother a "poemter", so she clearly knows about the writing. She also knows about Ella: "When she talks about the family she lists my stepchildren, Jamie and Rosa, and then Ella and Jack the dog. She did ask me recently if we could see Ella, but the time for me to explain about death has not come yet."

The family had always intended to move to Suffolk with Ella, but her illness made that impossible. Now, with Molly ready for pre-school and the grown-up stepchildren living in London, the break has finally been made.

"We are living out of a bag at my parents' house and, in a way, I have been caught out by the interest in the book. I thought I would spend a quiet summer unpacking."

Goss had suddenly understood, she said, that she needed to live somewhere else. "You don't realise how many ghosts there are around you. I may have panicked for a while that I was leaving Ella behind, but her ashes are on the Suffolk coast. I don't think I could ever have left Liverpool otherwise."

The Forward poetry prizes will be announced at a ceremony at the Southbank Centre on 1 October

Featuring work from big and tiny presses, the nominees were hailed by chair of judges Jeanette Winterson for 'lit-up living language'

The shortlists for the 2013 Forward poetry prizes have been announced, reflecting modern preoccupations ranging from the internet dating to 21st-century psalms and karaoke bars to documentary poems.

The shortlist for the £10,000 best collection award is headed by Michael Symmons Roberts, who won the Whitbread award for poetry in 2004, and Glyn Maxwell, whose collection Pluto examines the language of dating websites: "Together would be easy … We sent some messages, Lynn & Greg, made a date … She texted me some shite / about her kid being ill and I had to write / I hope he gets better soon while harbouring doubts / he was ever born."

Rebecca Goss is shortlisted for Her Birth, an autobiographical sequence about the poet's daughter, who was born with an incurable heart condition; Sinead Morrissey for Parallax, her examination of what's caught and lost in the act of photography; and Jacob Polley for The Havocs, a collection that conjures horror and unsettling comedy from traditional forms.

The chair of judges, Jeanette Winterson, hailed a "powerful year for poetry".

"We made our choices looking for poems that used a lit-up living language and had a sense of purpose," she said.

The shortlist for the £5,000 best first collection prize includes Dan O'Brien's War Reporter, inspired by interviews he conducted with a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Also in the running are collections published by two tiny presses – Adam White's Accurate Measurements is published by Doire Press in Connemara, while Steve Ely's collection, Oswald's Book of Hours, is published by Smokestack Press in Middlesborough. They are pitted against three of the biggest publishers in UK poetry: Faber & Faber for Emily Berry's Dear Boy – a wittily disturbing soliloquy; Bloodaxe Books for Hannah Lowe's Chick; and Seren Books for She Inserts the Key, a collection that juxtaposes sparrowhawks and the Bank of England, crafted by former City solicitor Marianne Burton.

On the £1,000 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem shortlist are Patience Agbabi, CJ Allen, Nick MacKinnon, Rosie Shepperd and Hugo Williams.

The shortlists come at a troubled time for poetry publishers, who have suffered poor sales in recent years, with collections of poems by a single author particularly hard it. Official industry figures from Nielsen BookScan show a sharp decline in sales of 15.9% last year, meaning that the total market for poetry books in the UK was worth just £6.7m in 2012. Independent publisher Salt announced that it would cease publishing collections by single authors, saying they were no longer "viable".

Winterson is joined on the panel by the poets Paul Farley and Sheenagh Pugh, the actor Samuel West and journalist David Mills.

The awards will be announced at a ceremony in London's Southbank Centre on 1 October 2013.

THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION

Her Birth by Rebecca Goss (Carcanet Press, Northern House Imprint)
Pluto by Glyn Maxwell (Pan Macmillan, Picador Books)
Parallax by Sinead Morrissey (Carcanet Press)
The Havocs by Jacob Polley (Pan Macmillan, Picador Books)
Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, Random House)

THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION

Dear Boy by Emily Berry (Faber)
She Inserts the Key by Marianne Burton (Seren Books)
Oswald's Book of Hours by Steve Ely (Smokestack Books)
Chick by Hannah Lowe (Bloodaxe Books)
War Reporter by Dan O'Brien (CB Editions)
Accurate Measurements by Adam White (Doire Publishing)

THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM

The Doll's House by Patience Agbabi (Poetry Review)
Explaining the Plot of 'Blade Runner' to My Mother Who Has Alzheimer's by CJ Allen (Coffee-House Poetry, Troubadour International Poetry Prize)
The Metric System by Nick MacKinnon (Warwick Review, University of Warwick)
A Seedy Narrative or Moments of Lyrical Stillness? by Rosie Shepperd (The Poetry Business)
From the Dialysis Ward by Hugo Williams (London Review of Books)

Whilst counselling restraint, Pope's famously stinging wit is here trained on targets that can still be seen today

This week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism. The whole poem runs to 744 lines, but that shouldn't put you off! It's as readable as it was 300 years ago, and highly pertinent to many burning literary issues – writers' prizes and who judges them, for instance. Pope wrote it in 1709, the year his first work, four pastorals, appeared in print. He was barely 21. When it was published in 1711 it earned the young poet immediate acclaim.

Typically, Pope undertook the work in a competitive spirit. He was an ambitious, driven writer, largely self- and home-educated because of a painful spinal deformation, and because the repressive legislation against Catholics at the time denied him access to a university.

It was Nicholas Boileau's treatise, L'Art Poétique, which fired Pope to produce his own study of literary-critical principles. Like Boileau, he champions neoclassicism and its governing aesthetic of nature as the proper model for art. His pantheon of classical writers, the "happy few," as he calls them, includes Quintilian, Longinus and, most importantly, Horace.

Pope's ideals may be recycled, but there's no doubting his passionate belief in them. Deployed in his sparkling heroic couplets, the arguments and summaries are alive with wit, verbal agility and good sense. From his neoclassical scaffolding, he looks outwards to the literary marketplace of his own age. It was a noisy time, and sometimes the reader seems to hear the buzz of the coffee house, the banter, gossip and argument of the writers and booksellers, the jangle of carts and carriages.

Pope's wit is famously caustic, so it's surprising how often the essayist advocates charity and humility. In the chosen section, he begins by advising restraint in criticising dull and incompetent poets. His tongue is in his cheek, as it turns out: "For who can rail as long as they can write?" Although he takes the view that bad critics are more culpable than bad poets, Pope enjoys a sustained dig at the poet-bores who go on and on and on. The metaphor of the spinning-top implies that a whipping will simply keep them going. Tops "sleep" when they move so fast their movement is invisible – hence the faded cliché "to sleep like a tops". The metaphor shifts to "jades" – old horses urged to recover after a stumble and run on, as these desperate poets "run on", their sounds and syllables like the jingling reigns, their words "dull droppings".

From the "shameless bards" in their frenzy of forced inspiration, Pope turns his attention to the critics, and, with nice comic effect, tars them with the same brush. "There are as mad, abandoned critics too." The "blockhead" he conjures reads everything and blindly attacks everything, "From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales." Durfey is placed pointedly at the bottom of the pile. He was generally considered an inferior poet, although Pope's friend Addison had time for him. Samuel Garth, on the other hand, was well-regarded, by Pope and many others, for a poem, The Dispensary, denouncing apothecaries and their cohort physicians. There was a rumour current that Garth was not its real author.

Sychophancy is one of the Essay's prime targets. Pope's rhetoric rises to a pitch as he castigates the hypocrisy of the "fops" who always praise the latest play, and the loquacious ignorance of the preferment-seeking clergy. St Paul's Churchyard, the corrupt precinct of the booksellers, may be full of bores and fools, but there's no safer sanctuary at the cathedral's altar.

The Essay is rich in epigrams, still widely quoted. "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" is among the best known and most borrowed (by Frank Sinatra, among others). Briefly allegorising, Pope goes on to contrast cautious "sense" and impetuous "nonsense", again evoking the rowdy traffic of 18th-century London with the onomatopoeic "rattling".

The flow has been angrily headlong: now, the pace becomes slower, the argument more rational. Antithesis implies balance, and the syntax itself enacts the critical virtues. Where, Pope asks, can you find the paradigm of wise judgement? It's not a rhetorical question. The poem goes on to provide the answer, enumerating the classical models, having a little chauvinistic nip at the rule-bound Boileau, and happily discovering two worthy inheritors of the critical Golden Age, Roscommon and Walsh.

Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary. And we might even take some tips from writers of the past.

From "An Essay on Criticism," Part Three

'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain,
And charitably let the dull be vain:
Your silence there is better than your spite,
For who can rail so long as they can write?
Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep,
And lashed so long, like tops, are lashed asleep.
False steps but help them to renew the race,
As, after stumbling, jades will mend their pace.
What crowds of these, impenitently bold,
In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets, in a raging vein,
Ev'n to the dregs and squeezings of the brain,
Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence.

  Such shameless bards we have, and yet 'tis true
There are as mad, abandoned critics too.
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listening to himself appears.
All books he reads, and all he reads assails,
From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales.
With him, most authors steal their works, or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend,
Nay showed his faults – but when would poets mend?
No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's church yard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;
But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks.
And never shocked and never turned aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide.

  But where's the man who counsel can bestow,
Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiassed, or by favour, or by spite:
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learned, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?
Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined;
A knowledge both of books and human kind;
Generous converse; a soul exempt from pride;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?

Reading 162 collections, it was fascinating to compare the work – and to see whose lines stayed with me

What's the best thing about judging the Forward prizes? Free books? Reassessing a poet you hadn't paid enough attention to? Those are good, but the best might be the poems, and odd lines, that stick in your head. They may be from books that didn't even make the shortlist, but they've still made a mark – Dannie Abse's line "Men become mortal when their fathers die" from his collection Speak, Old Parrot, isn't going to leave me any time soon.

I admit that the main reason I agreed to judge was that the panel includes Sam West, and the fan-girl in me couldn't resist meeting Major Edrington from the Hornblower series. (His mellifluous readings during the judging improved many a poem about which I'd been unsure.) But I did wonder if I could keep up, especially when 12 or 15 books arrived at a time. Ninety-six publishers submitted books; we read 162 collections.

It became addictive to compare one with another, to re-read and see something that didn't immediately impress become more powerful, to find a poet whose work I thought I knew doing something unexpected – and to glory in the work of good new poets. This last happens most often on the First Collection list, my favourite to read for. It's also pleasing that half the shortlist comes from tiny houses: small presses are often where the most adventurous writing happens. We were supposed to produce shortlists of five in the three categories (Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem); there are six on the Best First shortlist, which indicates the quality in depth in that category.

When the judging panel – Jeanette Winterson, Sam West, Paul Farley, David Mills and myself – compared our shortlists, some books and poems had gripped only one judge, who was nonetheless passionate about his/her fancy and would argue fiercely to convince the rest. If you ever thought it was possible for these lists to be "fixed" by one judge, be assured it's jolly hard; there are four other equally opinionated folk in that room.

I'm glad to say there was no pressure to achieve unanimity, because that's how to end up with an anodyne list that neither offends nor inspires. Some choices are unanimous; others are majority decisions. At the end of our four-hour judging session we were all allowed to break with consensus-building and nominate a few personal favourites for the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry, which should ensure the book – published on 1 October, the same day the prizes are announced – shows a wide range of the best poetry of this year. The anthology, possibly even more than the prizes, is the real fruit of our labour: it's for those who suspect they might enjoy contemporary poetry but who aren't prepared to pick through 162 collections to find out. In other words, we've strained our eyes and, occasionally, our minds so you don't have to.

Any trends? Philip Larkin once famously denounced the "myth-kitty", but his disapproval has not killed it. I met the whole Greek and Roman pantheon, several times. Unlike Larkin, I'm not against mythical beings in poetry; it depends how you use 'em. But I was surprised at their popularity in this year's crop. Another kind of poem much in vogue is where a narrator watches a craftsperson making something. It might be anything from lace to a Dutch barn; the fascination is with the act of making, which parallels the poet's own craft. Again, this can work or not, but it can risk looking a little vicarious. It's no accident that one of the books on the first collection shortlist, Adam White's Accurate Measurements, is by a poet who has himself worked as a joiner: the immediacy and assurance of his poems on the craft is striking.

There are collections with a central theme, like Rebecca Goss's Her Birth and Dan O'Brien's War Reporter, and more disparate ones – Sinéad Morrissey's Parallax, Marianne Burton's She Inserts the Key. In the individual poems list there is both grim subject matter and humour, often coexisting. I don't think you could identify any unifying principle to the poems and books chosen, other than that they had to be memorable, to stay in the mind even after the judge had read another couple of dozen. That was my yardstick.

In 1819, the Manchester Yeomanry drew their sabres and charged a crowd of demonstrators. As Maxine Peake prepares to perform Shelley's angry poem about the outrage, John Mullan deciphers its verses for modern readers

On 16 August 1819, a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain's notoriously corrupt system of political representation. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn, and at least 15 people, including a woman and a child, were killed.

The businessman John Taylor, who had witnessed the aftermath, went on to set up the Manchester Guardian in response. It was via newspapers, almost a month later, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, living in Italy, found out about what became known as the Peterloo massacre. "The torrent of my indignation," as he put it, flowed into The Masque of Anarchy, a poem devised to be accessible to a wide readership but doomed not to reach it. Though he sent it back to Britain, his friend Leigh Hunt felt it could not be safely published, the perpetrators of the massacre having been exonerated. It remained unpublished until the 1830s. This weekend, Maxine Peake will deliver a new interpretation of the work, mere steps from the site of the massacre itself.

Running to 91 stanzas, the poem is a prophetic dream, an apocalyptic vision of Regency Britain and the shaky legitimacy of its ruling class. In the first part, the nation's leading politicians parade like monsters, leading the figure of Anarchy around on a white horse to trample the multitudes. In this vision, the true anarchists are Britain's rulers, who delight in fear and disorder. Anarchy's followers, who include lawyers and priests, take possession of palace and parliament. They are challenged only by a "maniac maid" called Hope, though "she looked more like Despair".

Like the protesters at Peterloo, she is about to be trampled when a shape arises like a mist to kill Anarchy. We hear a voice advocating freedom and encouraging the people to seize it. We see "a great Assembly … Of the fearless and the free" assailed, like the Peterloo crowds, by the troops of their rulers. Yet their bayonets and scimitars are somehow defeated by the resolution of the people.

The title of the poem refers both to a dramatic pageant (like the masques that monarchs stage to celebrate their power) and an organised deception (the "masquerade" of those in authority). The poet's political passions were notorious and are still famous, but it was not these that made him a great poet. He was always trying out different forms: each new poem was a new experiment with rhyme and metre. The vision is recounted in the same stanzas as were used in popular ballads. The result is a dizzying mixture of poetic wit and furious hyperbole.

The Masque of Anarchy
The first nine stanzas annotated

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

The poem is a dream, like the dream visions in Chaucer or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Yet in the first verse we also have the sense of Shelley being woken from the unreality of his life in Italy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

Viscount Castlereagh, leader of the Tories in the Commons, was a spokesman for the harsh measures of political repression that followed the Peterloo massacre. Note that "Murder" is like Castlereagh, not the other way round: individual politicians are reduced to personifications of eternal vices.

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Shelley's friend Leigh Hunt praised his "union of ludicrousness with terror" – as in this blending of apocalyptic vision with pantomime.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

Lord Eldon was lord chancellor. He decided the fate of Shelley's children by his first wife, Harriet, after her suicide – refusing Shelley custody because of his "immoral and vicious" principles. Eldon was renowned for weeping even as he pronounced the harshest of sentences.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

A stanza echoed in WH Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant: "when he cried the little children died in the streets".

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

Viscount Sidmouth was home secretary and defended the Peterloo massacre. He evokes shadows because he was in charge of the government's secret service, and is "clothed with the Bible" because of his apparent piety: he was an advocate of church building.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

A typical Shelley list, the "spies" recalling Sidmouth's network of informers.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

Shelley explicitly evokes the Book of Revelation: the three British lords and Anarchy are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

Like the Mark of the Beast in Revelation on the one who is King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.

'Host Organism', commissioned to encourage churches to back the practice, is about 'making new things possible'

The former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has added his voice to a campaign for organ donation, penning a poem to mark National Transplant Week, running until 14 July.

In the 19-line poem, which is called "Host Organism", Williams – who is now master of Magdalene College, Cambridge – takes an oblique line on transplants, imagining surgeons as gardeners and donors as "unnamed birds".

He said: "I began with two basic pictures: something being implanted and something breaking through what feels like stasis or deadlock. So the natural point of convergence was the idea of a seed dropped, anonymously, disturbing the heaviness of the soil – the heaviness of what you have come to expect, what you have unhappily got used to. A future that begins in the dark, with surgeons as gardeners; and the hardness, the discomfort of welcoming a new life that bristles and stirs painfully inside.

"But essentially it's a poem about hope, and about the sort of providential accident of one life being planted in another and making new things possible."

The poem was commissioned by fleshandblood, a two-year cross-denominational campaign which aims to persuade churches to adopt blood and organ donation as part of their culture of giving.

Fleshandblood is backed by the NHS Blood and Transplant authority – the first time the National Health Service has campaigned with churches. Signatories include the Church of England, the United Reformed Church, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, and the Salvation Army.

Campaign director Jules Hollidge said: "Churches have a tradition of generosity. The aim is to get them to consider organ donation alongside the donation of time and money."

"The NHS needs to find 200,000 extra blood donors every year to make up for the ones that drop off the register. As far as organ donation goes, the greatest thing is to get people talking about it, because it's the families who have to give consent."

Host Organism is the first poem Williams has made public since retiring as archbishop last year. He was described in the Guardian as "a subtle and skilled poet" when his most recent collection, Headwaters, was published in 2008.

Host Organism

I have been living
under the layers
of grain and moisture,
earth in my nostrils
and the years ahead
sitting like hard
pebbles in my gut,
and the hands that get
to sift the slack
grit, while I sleep
fearfully through hours
of gardening labours,
pull themselves clear
and scrape nails clean
so that I feel the pricking
of green points that seek pathways and waking
and tomorrow's work,
pushing out of the seed
dropped by some unnamed bird.

John Mullan's commentary on The Masque of Anarchy was a welcome and informative read (Anarchy in Peterloo, G2, 9 July) and it's great that the poem itself is available online. If only this were the case for Shelley's Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, published in 1811. Having slipped out of sight for nearly 200 years, the poem was "discovered" in 2006, put up for sale and is now "in private hands". The effect of this bit of business is that the poem is not generally available, as making it so would lower the value of this unique copy. This reminds me that though we talk blithely about the "republic of letters" and the "free circulation of ideas", when it comes to the rules of property, we interested readers can go hang. Perhaps Amnesty could take on the injustice of the continuing imprisonment of Shelley's poem.
Michael Rosen
London

• Maxine Peake is to perform Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy in Manchester this weekend. It's some feat. Years apart, Paul Foot persuaded two of his young sons, Matt and Tom Foot, into learning the poem by heart. His eldest son, John Foot, refused the bribe. It was a commercial transaction at so much a verse, the rate rising with the number of verses remembered. A cassette records Matt reciting 73 of the 91 verses when he was under 10 and also, years later, Tom reciting the poem on his 13th birthday on 16 August 1992. In 1819, that was the day of the Peterloo massacre outside Manchester. Shelley's poem was a furious response to the massacre, but it was not published until 10 years after his death. Paul's wonderful book, Red Shelley, was written to restore Shelley's political ideas to his poetry.
Rose Foot
London

(Folk Police/Proper)

Jim Causley is one of the finest, most easy-going singers in the British folk revival. His distant relative, Charles Causley, who died in 2003, was one of the most popular British poets of the late 20th century, celebrated for his children's poems and stories of the supernatural or his native Cornwall, with a style partly influenced by his love of folk songs. Now Jim has set some of Charles's poems to music, in an album mostly recorded in the poet's study at Cyprus Well, his former home in Launceston, with Jim playing the poet's old piano and backed by a small band. The songs range from a jaunty, bluesy setting for one of his best-loved poems, Timothy Winters, through to a sturdy treatment of Angel Hill and a spoken, harp-backed Sibard's Well. A thoughtful, gently effective tribute.

Rating: 4/5