The year in poetry: Anne Carson’s funny but bleak ‘Float’ stands out

Anne Carson's Float (Cape, £16.99) collects 22 pamphlets in a clear slipcase, including poems about the death of her older brother (which she so memorably wrote about in Nox (2010)), brilliant litanies which draw on Ancient Greek poets and 20th-century visual art (and, in one case, the instruction manual for her microwave), funny, theatrical poems for Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, and cross-genre essays, including the reflection on Francis Bacon, Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, which was initially commissioned by Belinda McKeon and first performed at the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire.

Float is the best new "book" I've read this year, funny, bleak and urgent, as might be gathered from Carson's definition of her art: "If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it."

Why are we being written?

Denise Riley's Say Something Back (Picador, £9.99) was her first collection since Selected Poems in 2000. The poems often question why it is they are being written: "what are you for now[?]", she asks in A Part Song, one of the poems here whose insistence on wit and beauty feels like a poem for the ages, good company and fit sequel for the work of Ben Jonson, William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop.

Ben Lerner's publishers have used the success of his two very enjoyable novels, Leaving Atocha Station and 10:04, to collect his three books of poetry with new work in No Art (Granta, £14.99). Lerner is funny and smart and his high-wire sequences are a pleasure to read. The influential and original English poet Matthew Welton shares Lerner's artful approach to form and language, and his The Number Poems (Carcanet, £9.99) is just as enjoyable, a day-glo sugar rush of a book.

Taking liberties

Rita Ann Higgins' Tongulish (Bloodaxe, £9.95) continued to show this artful, innovative poet taking liberties with the language, her disenchanted politics matched with an enchanter's way with words, as when Primula Vulgaris walks

“through a funnel of colour,

a pale yellow dress,

not a fairy in sight.

Sabhaircin sabhaircin.”

This year many poets were commissioned to respond to the Rising, which led to poems that were respectable and sympathetic, but I was most struck by Tom French's angry riff on the Easter 1916 helpline in The Way to Work (Gallery, €12.50).

It was, more generally, a year of stocktaking for poetry, and perhaps the best, most revelatory books were anthologies and selections. Anyone who appreciates the entangling beauty of the best contemporary lyric poetry, in or out of Ireland, will enjoy picking up the new selections from Martina Evans (The Windows of Graceland: New and Selected Poems, Carcanet, £12.95), Vona Groarke (Selected Poems, €12.50), Derek Mahon (New Selected Poems, Gallery/Faber, €13.90) and Paul Muldoon (New Selected Poems, Faber, £14.99).

Finally, Louis de Paor's contentious, revelatory Leabhar Na hAthghabhála: Poems of Repossession (Cló Iar-Chonnachta/Bloodaxe, £15) selected well from a rich century of Irish-language poetry, with some terrific, newly-commissioned translations into English.