Jo Shapcott's poetry collection Of Mutability won the Costa prize this week. She talks here about how cancer transformed her outlook – and her work

In 2003, Jo Shapcott – a poet of shifting territories, of pavements rippling beneath feet, fingerprints that dent hillsides – found herself crossing a line into another world. She had been working incessantly in the months before; teaching and travelling, fulfilling commissions, "running about, with no time to reflect". Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Suddenly she was in an unknown landscape, that of surgery and chemotherapy, hair loss and waiting rooms, enormous uncertainty and enforced rest. The changes were fundamental.

"The body has always been a subject for me," she says. "It is the stage for the high drama of our lives, from birth to death and everything in between. When you observe your own body under physical change like that, there's a new kind of urgency. I had a lumpectomy, my lymph glands out, chemo and radiotherapy. You go through several different stages, so you don't know how ill you are for a while, and the verdict keeps getting worse and worse, until you can actually take action, start treatment."

She refers to the essay On Being Ill, in which Virginia Woolf describes the transformative nature of sickness. "It is like stepping into a different world, where there are different rules, ways of behaving, ways of seeing," says Shapcott. "Woolf talks about the amount of time you spend lying on your back, so that the horizontal view is suddenly much more typical than the vertical view. And that means you see life anew – you're open to the sky."

This openness forms a golden thread through Shapcott's latest collection, Of Mutability, which was named as the Costa book of the year on Tuesday night. The book includes a dedication to her doctors at Hereford County Hospital, and while it never refers to breast cancer specifically, her illness, and more particularly its effects on her outlook, flows through the collection with trademark surrealism, and wry, unsentimental warmth.

In the first poem, the title poem, she starts out noting that "Too many of the best cells in my body /are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw" before reverting to that horizontal perspective. The second stanza bursts with both optimism and fear, a complicated euphoria: "Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,/angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,/join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or/learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,/flying, fishing, sex without touching much./Don't trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky."

It was the hope expressed in Shapcott's "meditations on mortality", among other qualities, that the Costa judges seem to have responded to. The chair of judges, Andrew Neil, said the collection had won the backing of a "clear majority" of the panel, against an exceptionally strong field, before calling it, "very special, unusual and uplifting". Shapcott tells me she was "gobsmacked". And when asked where the £30,000 prize would go, she suggests she will "probably do the guttering".

"I wasn't expecting to win," she says. "I'd come to the evening very happy to have won the poetry section alone, that was terrific. I think the special pleasure is that it might mean that readers who usually just like novels, or memoirs, might pick up a book of poems."

I can't pretend to be a disinterested observer – either of who won the prize (I was commissioned to interview whoever triumphed), or whether that guttering gets fixed. In 2009, my boyfriend and I bought the flat above Shapcott's in south London, and so the three of us share a house and a garden. Exquisite luck on my part, because Shapcott is everything you could want in a neighbour and friend: kind, funny, highly intellectual yet entirely unpretentious.

She describes herself as hugely curious about the world, and this comes out in her splintered, fervent passions. Throughout the prize ceremony, for instance, my boyfriend was texting me updates on the Arsenal v Ipswich match to pass on; Shapcott is a huge Gunners fan. Then there's her planting. There was a period, a few years back, when she toyed with leaving our small garden to the foxes, who had taken up happy residence, but since claiming it back, she can often be found kneeling on the lawn come spring, arms submerged in soil. Over the last few years, she has taken science course after science course with the Open University, and she also has a deep passion for videogames – which she shares with her friend and fellow poet, Don Paterson.

Shapcott is grounded and clever, the sort of person you can broach any subject with, yet we've never really talked about her illness. And we don't talk much about the details now – more about what came next. For her, it seems to have been a doorway to a different life. In early discussions about the book's cover: "I had imagined it being quite dark," she says, "even black, but I think mutability – a word I love – suggests death and decay, but also change, which is quite twinkly and green" (the colour they ultimately plumped for). "It quickly became clear to me that mutability has these twinklings of joy, sometimes ecstasy, which comes through in the poems, I think."

This is true. In The Deaths, for example, Shapcott anthropomorphises death, imagines the pair of them walking together, "two drunkards" – before he gives her a look and she implodes "like a ripe mango". If ever there was an ecstatic description of death, there it is. In Hairless, she asks the sensitive question: "Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:/it's newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff," before describing a woman who has lost her hair. "It was clear just from the texture of her head,/she was about to raise her arms to the sky".

I ask whether that period changed her sense of the world. She says it did, dramatically. "When Dennis Potter was dying, he filmed that famous interview, in which he talked about looking out of the window, and observing the blossominess of the blossoms with an increased urgency and joy. And I think that does happen to cancer survivors – apparently it's really common to feel euphoria, if you get through the treatment, because it's a marathon . . . A lot gets stripped away, including bad things, and your relationship to your body and the world changes. Everything is more insecure. But somehow that's exhilarating. When you sit down at the desk again, it's a new start. Who am I as a poet? How do I write, now all these changes have occurred?"

Growing up fast

Luckily Shapcott is a writer who is at home with change and shift, qualities she recognised as essential to her work at an early stage. She was born in London in 1953, and grew up in Hemel Hempstead with her older brother Nigel, her primary school teacher mother, and her father, who worked in the car industry. She was always a great reader, "pathologically so", she says, and an early, faintly obsessive interest in synchronised swimming was diverted by teachers at her comprehensive, who encouraged her love of writing.

It was a happy childhood, which ended abruptly when she was 18, with the sudden, unexpected death of her parents, within a month of one another. "My mother died of cancer, and my father died a month later of a heart attack," she says. "They'd both been ill, but no one had any reason to think my father would die – and, in fact, I don't think my brother and I realised my mother had a terminal illness until the night before she died. I'm sure my father knew, but we didn't."

The experience shaped her in unforeseen ways. "I think something like that makes you more reflective, makes you grow up fast as well, and think about how the universe works. I want to know why things are like they are. Of course, you never really do, but you don't stop looking."

She went to study at Trinity College in Dublin not long afterwards, and started, tentatively, to find her voice as a poet. This proved slightly complicated. For one, there were very few female role models for aspiring poets in the late 60s and early 70s, and for another, she lacked that sense of rootedness, of connection to place, that so much great literature is founded on. She wrote about this in the essay Confounding Geography, where she notes that as a young writer she was told to "delve into the language and landscape of your own territory. In a writer like Seamus Heaney the landscape and place names of his home could become, in the poem Anahorish, 'soft-gradient/of consonant, vowel meadow'. As a young writer I felt at a disadvantage.

"I grew up in a new town, Hemel Hempstead, where there was absolutely no vowel meadow, and where the spoken language was flat, a version of London watered down by a mild accumulation of the various modes of speech of the many people who had moved there from all over the place."

Her saviour was the US poet Elizabeth Bishop, whose similarly rootless work she had fallen for deeply. Shapcott started a promising PhD on Bishop's poetry at Oxford, but then landed a two-year scholarship to Harvard, where she studied under Heaney, and writing staked its claim on her. While working for years as an arts administrator at the Southbank Centre, she began to get her poetry published, to great acclaim. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1985 and again in 1991 – the only poet to have done so twice. Her first collection, Electroplating the Baby, won the Commonwealth poetry prize; her third collection, My Life Asleep, won the Forward prize. Given her standing in the poetry world, the diamond-hardness of her imagery, coupled with the accessibility of her work, it's a surprise, in some ways, that she's not a household name. But she seems to enjoy her relative anonymity. I ask whether she would ever want one of the big public roles that exist for poets – the most prominent, of course, being Poet Laureate – and she firmly says no. "It's not something that would suit me, because I'm not really very public, and I prefer that. It suits the kind of poetry I write. I think if I were very prominent, it wouldn't do the poems any good."

There are repeated references – open and oblique – to the Iraq war in Of Mutability; does she consider her work to be political? Yes, she says. "First, it's poetry by a feminist. There's that, straight away. Then there are a lot of meditations on landscape in the book, which are informed by climate change. And, I guess, there's a political with a small 'p' spirit active in the work, in that you hope readers will walk into the poems and come out somehow changed."

Shapcott's political outlook led her to refuse a CBE in 2003 – an act she has never spoken about publicly before. At the time she was terribly ill, and having accepted the honour initially, she watched the government prepare to invade Iraq, and changed her mind. She sent her antiwar poem Phrase Book, written about the Gulf war, to the cabinet office along with a letter. "I said, I can't possibly accept this, and that was it." I sense she'd like to have drawn more attention at the time, to highlight the cause, "but I was being diagnosed and treated for cancer, so great public statements weren't on the cards really. I was just too ill."

She's well now, and working hard on her next collection (I breathe relief at this news, worried as I was that the baby elephant thump of her upstairs neighbours might keep her from her writing). She says that publishing this last collection has "cleared a block in my head, and at the moment I think of the new book as The Book of Life, because the poems all seem to be about things that are teeming". Does she still feel the euphoria she did at the end of treatment? "I do," she says. "All these years later, it hasn't gone away."

Hairless, by Jo Shapcott

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:

it's newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff,

every thought visible – pure knowledge,

mind in action – shining through the skull.

I saw a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning.

She mopped the green floor, dusted bookshelves,

all cloth and concentration, Queen of the moon.

You can tell, with the bald, that the air

speaks to them differently, touches their heads

with exquisite expression. As she danced

her laundry dance with the motes, everything

she ever knew skittered under her scalp.

It was clear just from the texture of her head,

she was about to raise her arms to the sky;

I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, to roar.

Taken from Of Mutability, published by Faber and Faber

The all-male shortlist for this year's prize is sadly true to form. But apportioning blame is not easy

The 2011 Forward prize shortlist has been announced. It's an anniversary year: the prize is celebrating its 20th birthday. And this year's list oozes quality: former winners Sean O'Brien and David Harsent compete with Whitbread winner John Burnside, Oxford poetry professor Geoffrey Hill, Irish poetry colossus Michael Longley - and OK, D Nurske, a Brooklyn poet of whom I confess I'd never heard until now. But doubtless he's wonderful too. A mighty list then, and nothing to complain about – except for the fact that there aren't any women on it.

Does it matter? I'm not sure. It's certainly noteworthy, however, so I mailed the chair of judges, Andrew Motion, to ask him where the women were. "Of course it was a matter of concern for us that the shortlist for the Best Collection was all-male," he replied. "But equally of course the judges (three women and two men) had to choose the books they liked best as collections of poetry. It's worth pointing out, too, that the same criteria led us to choose four books by women and two by men in the Best First Collection section, and two poems by women and two by men in the Best Single Poem category."

Fair enough, you might think, and there the matter might rest. I have uneasy feelings about the issue of gender on prize shortlists, anyway: while there are certain areas in which balance ought actively to be sought (the ratio of male to female reviewers, for example), I don't believe prize shortlists should be one of them. Some years there'll be more good books by women, some years by men; the judges should feel free to reflect this, and things will, one imagines, even out over time.

Except, in the case of the Forward prize, they haven't. I've just been back to check, and out of the 19 winners of the Best Collection award since the Forwards launched in 1992, only three have been women– Kathleen Jamie, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy. Three out of 19 – and we know, of course, that this year, that count is about to rise to three out of 20.

I find this more interesting – and indeed alarming – than I might otherwise have done because I'm partially responsible. I sat on the judging panel for the Forwards in 2007– the year Sean O'Brien won for the third time. Looking back, I see that our shortlist that year only included one woman, Eavan Boland. What's more, I recall from the judging meeting that she didn't make it into the final two: in the end, it came down to a lengthy fight between O'Brien and John Burnside. So if I want to go around accusing the Forwards of sexism, conscious or otherwise, I need to stick myself in the dock too.

And I don't want to level such an accusation, not really. I have no doubt that, every year, the Forward judges worked long and hard to give the prize to the collection that, in their estimation, was the very best in show. I know we did, and I fully stand by our choice. But that said, I find it difficult to accept that, over the past 20 years, male poets in the UK have outperformed female poets by a ratio of nearly 7:1.

So what's going on? Why do we find, again and again, in poetry and literature more generally, that men continue to dominate when it comes to prizes?

The first explanation, and to be frank the most straightforward, has to be that the men are simply better. Are they? How would we know? Unfortunately when we try to assess ability, things get sticky, because we lack an objective measure (prizes, indeed, might appear to be the closest we come to one). At this point, therefore, I've no choice but to fall back on my own subjective experience, which tells me this isn't the case. For every male poet or novelist I admire, there's a female I admire as deeply – she just may not be getting the prizes.

The second possibility is that prize juries are sexist. Again, I can't speak for all juries everywhere, at every time – doubtless you get the odd bad apple. But I'm pretty sure our jury wasn't composed of raving misogynists – and I'm very sure I myself don't deserve the label.

Which leaves us with hopelessly messy explanation number three: the paradigmatic one. While every member of every prize jury in the land may be able to hold her or his hand up and say with conviction that his/her judgments are not sexist, as a society, we're not there yet. Women are still paid less than men for the same jobs, hold fewer senior positions, are fatally underrepresented in politics. The society in which we operate isn't gender neutral yet, and it seems that our prizes reflect this. We're still in the middle of a paradigm shift, from a patriarchal society to a gender-blind one. A century ago, if the shortlist for a poetry prize had been all-male, no one would have thought to bat an eyelid. Paradoxically, we'll know we've hit equality when the same is true again.

Jo Shapcott, winner of the Costa book of the year award for Of Mutability, reads her poem I Go Inside the Tree

Costa prize-winning poet follows illustrious predecessors including WH Auden and John Betjeman

The poet Jo Shapcott, who began the year by winning the Costa book of the year award for her collection Of Mutability, has ended 2011 by being named the latest recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Decided by a committee of "eminent men and women of letters" selected by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the medal is given for either a body of work or for an individual poem, and counts among its previous recipients WH Auden, who took it in 1936, Siegfried Sassoon and John Betjeman. Shapcott was chosen for her body of work, including Of Mutability, which traced the poet's experience of breast cancer, Buckingham Palace has announced.

Duffy called the award "the true crowning" of a career which has seen Shapcott take the National Poetry Competition twice, the Commonwealth poetry award and the Forward prize. The poet laureate praised the "calm but sparkling Englishness" of Shapcott's poetry, which she said "manages to combine accessibility with a deeply cerebral engagement with all the facets of being human – alert to art and science, life and death".

"Her peers will be very proud and happy for her today," added Duffy. The medal was established in 1933 by George V at the suggestion of John Masefield, then poet laureate. It shows the crowned effigy of the queen on one side, and on the reverse an image of Truth holding the flame of inspiration. Shapcott, who turned down a CBE in 2003 over her concerns about the Iraq war, will be presented with the medal by the Queen next year, said Buckingham Palace.

Some of the speakers at the festival of ideas and open journalism share their highlights and reflections

India Knight, novelist

"The atmosphere here is very friendly: the crowd at my event, on gender equality, were really nice, really engaged. There was a great mix of angry older women and younger ones who I was convinced were going to ask me about vajazzling. I was a little disappointed when they didn't. But I'm going to stay for the rest of the day – just mill about and see as many other sessions as I can. I'm just about to dash in and see John Lanchester in the Question time: what is the future of capitalism? session. I'm a great admirer of his."

Grayson Perry, artist

"I'm wondering if I'm playing to the paper or the audience when I do the live G2 Interview with Decca Aitkenhead. It's different when you are on your on your own with an interviewer – you just have to worry about them. I just saw Jim Al-Khalili because I love him on the telly. I have to keep up with my daughter, who is a scientist. This is the nearest to a festival I'll get. I hate camping, mud, fancy dress, and circus skills bring me out in a rash. All of that spiritual-fucking-ality at Glastonbury. You'd have to get me in and out in a helicopter."

Philippa Perry, psychotherapist and author

"I think print newspapers are going to die and if they want to succeed they need to feel more like a family. We're in the age of interactivity: people want to feel a part of it; the audience is not content to be passive any more. So this is the way forward. As a reader I'm thrilled to be here for the day, at the cutting edge of the media. I was particularly impressed by Gary Younge, who I have never seen speak before and was erudite, charming and funny. Admirably he was wearing a hoodie in solidarity with Trayvon Martin [the black teenager shot last month in Florida]."

Robert Harris, author

"The Guardian has always had the air of being more than just a paper. I started reading it when I was 15, which was the early 1970s when Heath was prime minister. I was living in the midlands and remember feeling at the time that there weren't many people who saw things the same way as me. So the Guardian was like a family. I went to visit the printers when I was at school and developed an affinity with it from then on. I have been forced to re-read Fatherland for my talk today. I never revisit my books but since this one is 20 years old it seemed the right time to do it. I felt quite a stranger to it – so much has changed since then. And it was a lose/lose situation: either it would be good and you can't do better, or bad and you feel like a failure. It was like looking at an old photograph and thinking, 'Was I really like that?'"

Steve McQueen, artist and filmmaker

"I'm happy to be here."

Jeffrey Sachs, economist

"I'm thrilled to be at such a grand event. I was in Chile and en route to Mozambique but didn't want to pass the opportunity to come to London for this. It's a wonderful idea for newspapers to do this kind of thing, but it's also important for society in a time when we absolutely need engagement. People feel alienated from the political system and this is a way to make them feel a part of the debates that are going on."

Jo Shapcott, poet

"I very much enjoyed my talk and hope that the audience did too. The questions were very sharp, particularly one from a gentleman who asked whether you could tell if a poem was by a man or a woman; that is something I have thought about a lot myself. It's buzzing here. I keep bumping into people who are saying how much they are loving it. One person even said it was intellectual heaven."

Tom Watson, Labour MP and member of the Commons culture committee

"The Open Weekend is a fantastic idea. It's giving the newspaper back to its readers. It's really enjoyable to see so many of them in the building and waiting around outside. It's a real explosion of colour and excitement. I've only just got here, though, as I've had surgeries this morning in my constituency, and I've been going door to door. There's a real fury about the budget, which is encouraging politically, but not so encouraging for my constituents who are bearing the brunt of it. I'm going to be talking about phone hacking on a panel chaired by Jon Snow, with Amelia Hill, Nick Davies - oh and Alan Rusbridger, so I'd better be on my best behaviour. It's only now that the people involved in uncovering the scandal can begin to come up for air and try to make sense of it all. I think the three issues I want to talk about today are ownership, regulation and ethics."

Jon Snow, Channel 4 News presenter

"I don't want to talk about phone hacking. I'm sure others on the panel will want to, but I'm sick of talking about phone hacking. What I really want to talk about is what it tells us about Britain. What is it about this country that makes us vulnerable to those kind of practices, ones that don't seem to have affected other countries? Is it the same thing that renders us a playground for the Russian mafia, if you think about the Russian man who was shot here the other day? And what is it about Britain that means we have such an appetite for this sort of tabloid journalism – ever since Jack the Ripper? I suspect that we live quite dull lives in this country, and we have an appetite for the kind of gossip that spices up our dull lives."

Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet

"I've been a Guardian reader for years – my favourite section is Obituaries. I've come along today with no expectations of what it's going to be like. Unfortunately I can't stick around after my session, I've got other places to be."

Ed Balls, shadow chancellor

"The atmosphere in the session was fine – it was a little dark and difficult to see the audience, but we had some interesting questions. I spoke about my love for Dolly Parton, and revealed the fact that I'm going to be the first cabinet minister ever to run the marathon."

Fiona Shaw, actor

"This is democracy in action: playful and unexpected, with no filters between us, the readers, and the media. It's a public conversation, which is really what the media today should be."

Organisers of the Cultural Olympiad event are still looking for artists from 23 countries, and need the public to help them

• See the full list of poets here

From Ireland's Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney to Kim Jong-il's exiled former court poet Jang Jin Seong, hundreds of poets from around the world are set to gather on the banks of the Thames this summer in an attempt to recreate the poetic spirit of the ancient Olympic Games.

Thousands of nominations were received from the public for the best poet in their country, with a panel including the poet Simon Armitage and other experts whittling this down to find one poet from each of the 204 competing Olympic nations. One hundred and forty poets, from Kazakhstan's 24-year-old Akerke Mussabekova to 83-year-old Anise Koltz from Luxembourg, have already confirmed attendance at the festival, with the quest now to pin down writers from the remaining 64 Olympic countries.

In what is being called the biggest gathering of poets in world history, the writers will appear at Poetry Parnassus, a week-long series of poetic events at the end of June led by the Southbank Centre's artist-in-residence Armitage and artistic director Jude Kelly and inspired by epinicians, poetry commissioned as part of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece. It will see poets, rappers, storytellers and praise singers reading their work in more than 50 languages, from Haitian creole to Maori, with the event to open as 100,000 poems are dropped from a helicopter on to the waiting crowd. Many of the poets will be travelling to the UK for the first time.

"I'm delighted and amazed that it's happening," said Armitage. "This is an idea on the back of an envelope which I brought to the Southbank Centre. I thought they'd throw up their hands and roll their eyes but they said, 'Let's do it.'"

The poet said he thought of the festival as "a big sort of fair, where people are bringing their wares and putting them on display". "It's our own Olympic event, which is non-competitive and celebrating the ancient democratic art form of poetry," he added.

"It sounds like it'll be a week-long party," said the award-winning English poet Jo Shapcott, who will be representing Great Britain. "But I was rather reassured to hear that they weren't expecting me to wave the flag – quite a lot of my work questions the idea of what it means to be English, the nature of Englishness, and those poems are quite spiky and uncomfortable. I imagine that with over 200 poets from all over the world here, people will have similar questions, and part of our discussions will probably be on those ideas of cultural identities."

Heaney was picked for Ireland, while his fellow Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka is representing Nigeria. Former poet laureate Kay Ryan will be speaking for the US, Bill Manhire for New Zealand and John Kinsella for Australia. Lesser-known names at the festival range from North Korea's Jang, a former court poet to Kim who fled the country after becoming disillusioned with the regime, to Albania's Luljeta Lleshanaku, who grew up under house arrest as her parents opposed the former communist regime in the country. Nicaragua's poet Gioconda Belli was forced into exile in Mexico after time as a Sandinista revolutionary, while Didier Awadi, representing Senegal, is a rapper and political activist.

"Poetry's a broad church and the further you go globally the broader it is. Some countries' entire poetic tradition is in spoken word form and we wanted to represent that variety," said Armitage. "There will be everything from the learned literary academic poets to one writer who describes himself as a spoken word and tattoo artist, which would be a dangerous combination after a few drinks. And there are voices of protest and dissent – at the outset we knew we wanted a poet from North Korea but we imagined we would end up with a puppet poet sent by the government, whereas in fact we have got a dissenting voice who used to be a court poet and made his escape."

Organisers are still looking for artists from 23 countries, and would welcome suggestions from the public here for poets from Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Dominica, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Namibia, Nauru, Niger, Palau, Papua New Guinea, American Samoa, Seychelles, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Timor-Leste and Vanuatu.

Each poet will also be contributing a poem to an anthology, The World Record, out on 26 June from Bloodaxe Books. Poetry Parnassus is part of the finale of the Cultural Olympiad, and will take place at the Southbank Centre in London from 26 June to 1 July.

Carol Ann Duffy invites leading poets to recall a year in verse

1953 Dannie Abse
Winged Back

Strange the potency of a cheap dance tune.
– Noel Coward

One such winged me back to a different post-code,
to an England that like a translation
almost was, to my muscular days
that were marvellous being ordinary.
365 days, marvellous;

to an England where sweet-rationing ended,
where nature tamely resumed its capture
behind park railings. Few thorns. Fewer thistles;
to Vivat Regina and the linseed willow-sound
of Compton and Edrich winning the Ashes.

Elsewhere, Troy always burning. Newspaper stuff.
The recurring decimal of calamity.
Famine. Murder. Pollinating fires.
When they stubbed one out another one flared.
Statesmen lit their cigars from the embers.

They still do. With every enrichment
an injury. They bicker and banquet,
confer and dally, pull on cigars that glow
with blood-light. And the year 1953,
like the arson of Troy, is elsewhere. Ashes.

1955 Gillian Clarke
Running Away to the Sea

It might have been heatstroke, the unfocused flame of desire
for a name in a book, a face on the screen, the anonymous
object of love. Two schoolgirls running like wildfire,
bunking off through dunes to the sea, breathless.

We were lost and free, East of Eden.
It was James Dean, Elvis, Bill Haley and the Comets.
It was Heartbreak Hotel on the gramophone.
It was Heathcliff by torchlight in bed after lights-out.

The dunes were molten glass. We slowed to a dawdle,
rippling sand with our toes, grains of gold
through our fingers, on our skin, in our hair,
without words to say why, or who, or where.

This I remember. The hour was still, bees
browsing sea-lavender, and beyond the dunes
the channel as blue as the Gulf of Araby,
a name from the drowse of a day-dreaming lesson,

sun on the board, the chalk, Sister's hand, a far-away
voice, as if heard through water, murmuring rosaries:
Egypt, the Red Sea, the Bitter Lakes, Suez.
A psalm of biblical names called Geography.

That was the last day the world stood still. In a year
there'd be tanks in Budapest, over Sinai bombers on the move,
and I'd be in the streets on the march against war,
as Empires loosened their grip. It was almost like love.

1956 Douglas Dunn
Class Photograph

We were Elizabethan girls and boys,
Too young for politics, too old for toys.
Then Hungary and Suez changed all that,
Or so it feels in tired old retrospect.
Nostalgia corrodes the intellect.
It makes you want to eat your coat and hat.

One foot in childhood, one in adolescence,
Rock Around the Clock made far more sense
Even than The Battle of the River Plate –
Stiff upper lips and Royal Navy dash,
Its Technicolored brio and panache
Heroic, gore-less, brilliant, out of date.

Like Ovaltineys in their Start-rite shoes –
It catches up on you, it really does,
This looking back, this old class photograph.
Be-blazered in our uniforms and ties
(Who he? Who she?) – pensioners in disguise
As who they were, a pictured epitaph.

Pillar-boxes still red (though not much else is)
And the scarcely visible orthodoxies
All still in place, plus global urgency,
Destructive wars abroad . . . And yet, God bless
Democracy, dissent, and the NHS
Which underpins our civic decency.

1958 Michael Longley
1958

I lodged above a poetry collection, all
The Irish poets accumulating on Victor
Leeson's shelves in Dublin's Wellington Road,
Reflections in his shiny baby grand.

Bach preludes, Pears toilet soap, bacon smells,
My melancholy first Michaelmas Term,
Cycling to rediscover Nausicaa
In Stanford's class, Odysseus hiding his sex.

Over breakfast Victor said nothing at all
And I had little to say. "Two eggs please."
No poetry yet, none of that craziness,
Calypso, Penelope, where were the girls?

Greek Verse Composition and Latin Prose,
Conundrums, three-dimensional crossword
Puzzles, I banged my head. "The beautiful
Things are difficult," Stanford quoted.

The Latin love-elegy came true for me
Eventually, when I held her hand
During Les Enfants du Paradis
In the Astor cinema along the quays.

Fifty years later, in the catalogue
Of Victor Leeson's poetry books, I find
Like a digamma my name, and we talk
In silence over the breakfast table.

1961 Geoffrey Hill
Between the Cherubim

Tygers brush their compunction, sad drummer.
Our beat so to be beaten. Coventry's
unlaunched Odeon hangs in its gantries.
Remind me, now, who died that November.

Off-rhyme a law to itself. Nonsense. It
serves a turn. There must be comedians.
There does not have to be an audience.
I had not forgotten that death. Hence wit.

There is no true feeling without structure.
This may have been disputed. I recall
nothing from that tagged year I would wish ill.
Viewed through communal smoke a bad picture.

If we had birth it roared at discretion
of my wise child: a challenge to his time
so well served by the dealers of mis-fame.
This hiss of truth within thick air's secretion

I owe him for his love. And fabulous
Music probably there was; and justice
in fair measure; as ever malpractice,
trashy stuff cemented into fables.

1962 Brian Patten
Sixteen

Sixteen, Rimbaud and Whitman my heroes
"PS I Love You" playing in the loud cafés
In a Canning Street basement Adrian Henri
Painting The Entry of Christ into Liverpool

Adrift in an attic, in an ark buoyant with longings,
A map drawn by Garcia Lorca open before me
There was nothing that was not possible
Nothing that could not be reinvented

Ah poetry, at sixteen
Words smelled of tulips and marigolds
Their fumes made sentences
That the bees stole for themselves

1963 Ruth Fainlight
World Events

Nineteen sixty three: Kennedy is
assassinated, The Beatles release their first
album, and Valentina Tereshkova
floats weightless against a faint radiation
from the final remnants of the Big Bang –
the first woman in space.

I had to Google "world events" for that year,
but there was no problem remembering
what I'd been doing.

We travelled back from Morocco, because
Alan was invited to Russia, and now that Ted
had left her, Sylvia and I planned to spend
that month together in North Tawton
with our three babies (and my nanny
to make it possible), talking, walking,
and writing poetry.

I was the new mother: my son a few months
the younger; but she already had a daughter,
plus a published first collection – which made
me feel competitive, and I didn't like that! –
although she envied my glamorous life,
she confessed. But we acknowledged so much
in common, with delight.

That poetic meeting never happened, yet
I dream about it. What more to say? Everyone
knows the story's ending.

Credit cards, Valium, cassette tapes,
remote controls for TV: developments
of nineteen sixty three. And more events.
Now each protagonist of this sad tale,
bar me, is dead – yet all of us are blessed:
we live through poetry.

1966 Liz Lochhead
Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class

Her hair is cut into that perfect slant
– An innovation circa '64 by Vidal Sassoon.
She's wearing C&A's best effort at Quant
Ending just below the knicker-line, daisy-strewn.
Keeping herself in tights could blow her grant
Entirely, so each precious pair is soon
Spattered with nail-varnish dots that stop each run.
She's a girl, eighteen – just wants to have fun.

She's not "a chick". Not yet. Besides, by then
She'll find the term "offensive". "Dollybird", to quote
Her favourite mags, is what she aspires to when
Her head's still full of Honey and Petticoat.
It's almost the last year that, quite this blithely, men
Up ladders or on building sites wolf-whistle to note
The approval they're sure she will appreciate.
Why not? She did it for their benefit, looks great.

Nor does she object. Wouldn't think she has the right.
Though when that lech of a lecturer comments on her tits
To a male classmate, openly, she might
Feel – quick as a run in nylon – that it's
Not what ought to happen, is not polite,
She'll burn, but smile, have no word that fits
The insult, can't subject it to language's prism.
In sixty-six there's plenty sex, but not "sexism".

Soon: The Female Eunuch and enough
Will be enough. Thanks to newfound feminism and Greer,
Women'll have the words for all this stuff,
What already rankles, but confuses her, will seem clear
And she'll (consciously) be no one's "bit of fluff"
Or "skirt" or "crumpet". She'll know the rule is "gay" not "queer",
"Ms" not "Miss" or "Mrs" – she'll happily obey it
And, sure as the Pill in her pocket, that's how she'll say it.

This photo's saying nothing, is black and white, opaque.
A frozen moment, not a memory.
The boyfriend with the Pentax took it for the sake
Of taking it, a shot among many others, randomly,
To see how it would develop. Didn't imagine it'd make
An image so typical it'd capture time so perfectly.
How does she feel? Hey, girl, did it feel strange
To be waiting for the a-changing times to change?

1969 Christopher Reid
The Clearing

Was it Biba, or was it the schmatta bazaar
of Carnaby Street?
Did a narcoleptic sitar muddle the air
like incense,
or was there some more laddish beat?
The Stones? The Doors?
Had somebody pinned the Pirate Jesus face
of Che Guevara to the wall, or Waterhouse's
orgasmically grieving, teenaged Lady of Shalott?
No matter. What I do recall
is a clearing in the jungle, where, on a table,
half a dozen shallow pot-pourri bowls,
brimming with petal-coloured knickers,
encircled the bellied bulk
of an old, contemplative cash register.
Oblation? Prayer?
Or what?
Please don't ask me to explain, or to remember
anything else. I was there.

1972 Wendy Cope
1972

1972 was the year
Of the hippy librarians from Islington.
My flatmate met hers first
And I got off with his friend.

They had beards. They smoked dope.
They were very alternative.
Mine gave me a copy
Of Vedanta for the Western World.

I wore long Indian dresses
And tried to like the smell of joss sticks.
In August we sat in bed
And watched the Olympics, stoned.

Late that year I went into analysis.
Freud didn't get along
With the hippy boyfriend.
We drifted apart.

It was fun, some of the time,
While it lasted. You could say that,
I suppose, about most years,
About most lives.

1975 Andrew Motion
The Convoy of Tears

When I came home unexpectedly in the mid-afternoon
and found an extra knife and fork still wet and glittering
on the draining-board beside your own, I knew at once.
I ran upstairs and called your name in our ruined bedroom

but you had already left. Soon afterwards I saw Margaret
Thatcher taking over the Tory party from Edward Heath,
and one evening – unless I was mistaken – the dead body
of P. G. Wodehouse borne on a tank into the ruins of Saigon.

1977 Imtiaz Dharker
1977 (I am quite sure of this)

Some Glaswegians still speak of the Silver Jubilee
and the Queen's cavalcade sailing off
from George Square on a sea of Union Jacks.
Others recall that around the same time
the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen
was black-listed by the BBC

but what I remember is
that one night I danced in spangled
hotpants, with a boy in polyester
flares (I am quite sure of this),
in time, on track, one hand in the air,
one step forward, one step back.

Time is easily tangled. It falls over its own feet.
That year peeled itself as perfectly
as the rings around Uranus.
Smallpox was eradicated, miles of fibre optics
laid, personal computers offered to the masses.
People said it had never been so good

and what I remember is
the popcorn mix at Regal Cinema,
salt over sweet, the triumph of good
over evil, light-sabres slashing the air
in synchronised time, on track,
one step forward, one step back.

People said it had never been so bad,
Bengal hit by a cyclone, snow in Miami,
New York plunged into darkness.
and out of the sky a fireball fell on Innisfree.
People said it was a sign. And that was the year
Steve Biko died.

Other people died in other years, but that year
Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin died.
Jacques Prevert and Robert Lowell died.
In Memphis, Elvis died. Still,
someone called Roy Sullivan was struck
by lightning for the seventh time
and survived

but because of the odd way time unfolds,
what I remember is the last few seconds,
the countdown under a glitterball
(I am quite sure of this),
light flashing in your eyes
and your hair as you moved
in time, on track, one hand in the air,
one step forward, one step back,

and ah, ah, ah, ah,
staying alive. Staying alive.

1978 Alan Jenkins
Between

Some time between Plenty and Betrayal,
Between Kate Nelligan in a black
Waisted plunge-line '50s dress
Looking me straight in the eye
When she took her bow, and the back
Of Penelope Wilton's mini-skirt,
As "Jerry" clutched her arse,
Riding up dangerously high;

Between my last pair of denim
Hipster flares and my first
Pair of corduroy Oxford bags,
Between wanting to be taken for
The standard hippy-Fauntleroy
And the lost Picture Post boy
Who'd spat some lyrical venom
And died in the Spanish Civil War;

Between "Night Fever" and "Some Girls",
Between my monkish book-lined cell
And a bijou flat in Battersea
Paid for by the invisible man,
Between my last-ever Mandrax
And my first line of coke (I'd gone
Straight to drug heaven from drug hell),
Between invasion and peace plan;

Between a love I'd counted on
And the end of that self-flattery,
You were born, whom I met over kirs
Thirty years later. Between first kiss
And last, between offering your tail,
Your mobile number and email address
And administering the coup de grace,
You brought me to my knees. To this.

1981 John Burnside
Tommy McGhee, Corby Works

He had been there since '55,
his lungs thick with smoke
and urea, the wicks of his eyes
damp, like the walls
of the furnace he tended for years,
till they laid him off.
He'd thought he would be glad
to say goodbye;
but that last shift, walking away
with the cold flask and rolled-up newspaper
tucked in his coat,
he turned to the sudden black
where the ovens had been:
wet slag, and frost on the tracks
and the last sacks of by-product
shipped out to beet-farms
and landfill.
With severance pay
and two years to go
till his pension,
he'd money enough
to survive;
but he hated to see himself
idle, a man on his own,
his wife dead, his grandchildren grown
and moved away.
He rarely saw his son;
though, once, in a bar
on the Beanfield, he found him
sitting alone with The Mirror:
Natalie Wood had drowned
in the ocean, near Catalina,
a hint of champagne
on her breath, and the longtime
child star's bewildered smile
a memory now, as she stared up
out of the picture
and both of them, father and son,
remembered how, long ago,
they had almost
loved her, miming that song
about time
through her immigrant smile
that neither could disbelieve
as hard as he tried
– somewhere, a time and a place–
since there had to be something.

1982 Simon Armitage
Task Force

There the great gathered with gallant allies,
massing on the foreshore, fitted out marvellously.
Dukes and statesmen, some strutting on their steeds,
Earls of England, armies of archers,
stout sheriffs shouting sharp instructions
to the troops who rallied before the Round Table,
assigning soldiers to certain lords
on the seafront, in the south, at their sovereign's say so.
The barges being ready they rowed to the beach
to ferry aboard horses and fine battle-helmets,
loading the livestock in their livery and tack,
then the tents, the tough shields, tools to lay siege,
canopies, kit bags, exquisite coffers,
ponies, hackneys, horses-of-armour . . .
thus the stuff of stern knights was safely stored.
And when all stock was stowed they stalled no longer,
timing their untying with the turn of the tide;
ships of all sizes ran up their sails,
all unfurling at the moment of their monarch's command,
and hands at the gunwales hauled up the great anchors,
watermen wise to the ways of the waves.
The crew at the bow began coiling in the cables
of the carriers and cutters and Flemish crafts;
they drew sails to the top, they tended the tiller,
they stood along the starboard singing their shanties.

So the port's proudest ships found plentiful depth
and surged at full sail into changeable seas.
Without anyone being hurt they hauled in the skiffs:
shipmates looked sharp to shutter the portholes
and tested depth by lowering lead from the luff.
They looked to the lodestar as daylight lessened,
reckoned a good route when mist rose around them,
used their knowing with the needle-and-stone through the night,
when for dread of the dark they dropped their speed,
all the seadogs striking the sails at a stroke.

1985 Sean O'Brien
Another Country
Get there if you can
– W H Auden

Scattered comrades, now remember: someone stole the staffroom tin
Where we collected for the miners, for the strike they couldn't win,

Someone stole a tenner, tops, and then went smirkingly away.
Whoever did it, we have wished you thirsty evil to this day:

You stand for everything there was to loathe about the South –
The avarice, the snobbery, the ever-sneering mouth,

The lack of solidarity with any cause but me,
The certainty that what you were was what the world should be.

The North? Another country. No one you knew ever went.
(Betteshanger, Snowdown, Tilmanstone: where were they? In Kent.)

"People" tell us nowadays these views are terribly unfair,
But these forgiving "people" aren't the "people" who were there.

These days your greying children smile and shrug: That's history.
So what's the point of these laments for how things used to be?

Whenever someone sagely says it's time to draw a line,
We may infer that they've extracted all the silver from the mine.

Where all year long the battle raged, there's "landscape" and a plaque,
But though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back:

Here then lie the casualties of one more English Civil War,
That someone, sometime – you, perhaps – will have to answer for.

1987 Jo Shapcott
The Great Storm

We rode it all night. We were not ourselves then.

Through the window everything was horizontal.
In cars and ships and woods, folk died.
Small trees scattered like matchsticks
and a whole shed flew by. The world roared.
A branch broke into the kitchen,
strewed twigs into the banging cupboard,
filled broken crocks with leaves. I heard
a tricycle roll up and down the attic as
the firmament streamed through smashed tiles.

I loved you but I loved the wind more,
wanted to be as horizontal as the tree tops,
to cling to the planet by my last fingernail,
singing into the rush, into the dark.
I didn't know then I would watch
my beloveds peel off the earth

each side of me, flying among tiles, bins,
caravans, car doors and chimney pots,
watch them turn themselves into flotsam
and disappear as wholly as the pier
the next morning, a Friday, mid-
October. Gone, split, vamoosed
like the fifteen million trees.

1990 Philip Gross
Home

for John Gross

One day, in that year, and so quietly
that not the closest of us guessed,
the history of Europe changed.

I don't mean votes and constitutions,
old flags in the attic half a century
now tentative petals again,

but one day, one night out beyond
the houselights, beside one of those fires
you would tend, and attend,

and chivvy patiently to sleep. (So many
leaves, that year, as if they were pouring in
on quite another wind.)

It may be some recording angel, veiled
or given momentary body by a furl
of smoke, might have seen

the moment when, thin blue letter in hand
saying Come, you can come home now,
you knew: the place you'd dreamed

of going back to, with a family,
three horses, a path through the fields,
was nowhere. What could I do

by going, you said later, except see
it was gone? Blue paper crinkling in the fire.
Estonia was safe, here, inside you.

1997 Don Paterson
The Big Listener

Midnight. Connaught Square. A headlight beam
finds Cherie just back from her speaking date.
She looks at you. Less animal of late.
You lose no sleep but wake within a dream.
Your favourite: that old divided dark;
the white square at your neck; your good ear bent
towards the long sighs of your penitent.
You rinse a thousand souls before the lark
and wake refreshed, if somewhat at a loss
as to why they seem so lost for words.
They are your dead, who still rose to the birds
the day we filled the booths and made the cross,
before you'd forced them howling to their knees
to suffer your attentions. Spare us. Please.

2001 Lavinia Greenlaw
Monolith

It was the fact of what happened.
It stood before us like a locked dimension.

We gathered numbers, rehearsed names,
stored a million images.

Still the door would not open.
There was no door.

It stood before us.
Featureless.

Neither beginning nor ending,
it was the new – blank, immoveable.

2006 Tishani Doshi
Love Poem Disguised as an Elegy

When I see you these days
you are always at a party,
standing by a window, alone,
growing younger and younger.
Heaven's great, you say.
You and Saddam are pals,
and from this distance,
everything is forgiven.
Do you remember when …
But never mind.
It's always that last picture:
you propped up in bed,
your legs slightly raised,
the smell of piss,
purple sores,
a rebel body in disrepair.
Hush, you say, I have to go,
but remember, the heart
isn't a muscle, it isn't even a thing
that beats. It's what you love.
It's what you're doing today.

There'll be a time you grow
so young you won't know me,
and this is terrifying
because I still have things to ask
about the body and dying
and where memories go to live.
Just once, I'd like to see you
with the flower girls
back at the gate.
It wouldn't matter then,
if nothing like you
ever happened to me again.
It would have been enough
to have seen you change
into something small and golden,
charging off in to the waves
on your strong, white legs.
What need would there be
to speak of danger,
after you were gone, vanished,
like a dream into the day.

for Chandralekha, who died on 30 December 2006, the same day that Saddam Hussein was executed, also, the auspicious Hindu day of Vaikuntha Ekadashi, when the gates of heaven are supposedly open to all.

2012 Carol Ann Duffy
The Thames, London 2012

History as water, I lie back, remember it all.
You could say I drink to recall; run softly
till you end your song. I reflect. There was a whale
in me; a King's daughter livid in a boat.
A severed head
fell from its spike, splashed.
There was Fire –
birds flailed in me with burning wings –
Ice – a whole ox roasting where I froze, frost fair –
Fog – four months sunless, moonless, spooked by ships –
Flood – I flowed into Westminster Hall
where lawyers rowed in wherries, worried –
Blitz – the sky was war; I filmed it. Cut.
I held the Marchioness.
My salmon fed apprentices
until I choked on sewage; my foul breath
shut Parliament.
There was lament
at every stroke of every oar
which dragged the virgin's barge downstream.
Always bells; their timed sound, somewhen,
in my tamed tides, deep.
Caesar named me.
I taste the drowned.
A Queen sails now into the sun, flotilla
a thousand proud;
my dazzled surface gargling the crown.

• To order Jubilee Lines: 60 Poets for 60 Years, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (Faber, £12.99) for £8.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

Take a look at the poems from Carol Ann Duffy, Jo Shapcott, Alfred Tennyson and others which Winning Words have woven into the fabric of the Olympic Park

Jo Shapcott kicks off a new series of poets reading from their favourite work by another author. Shapcott picks Emily Dickinson

Actors and poets including Juliet Stevenson and Jo Shapcott will gather to recite the entire collection 50 years on from its publication

"The muse," wrote Sylvia Plath to her friend and fellow poet Ruth Fainlight shortly before her death in 1963, "has come to live here, now Ted has gone". Next month, 50 years after the manuscript which would become Ariel was discovered on the late poet's desk, Fainlight will join a starry, all-female line-up of actors and poets including Juliet Stevenson, Miranda Richardson and Samantha Bond in a unique dramatic reading of Ariel.

Fainlight will take on "Elm", the poem Plath dedicated to her friend and which opens: "I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: / It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there." Richardson will read "The Arrival of the Bee Box" ("I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby / Were there not such a din in it"), and Gerda Stevenson "Morning Song" ("Love set you going like a fat gold watch"), with 40 performers – from Anna Chancellor to Siobhan Redmond and Harriet Walter - lined up to read the entire restored edition of the original manuscript of Ariel on 26 May as part of the Southbank Centre's London Literature festival.

"It's an utter one-off," said James Runcie, the centre's head of literature, who came up with the idea for the performance at the Royal Festival Hall. "It's not been performed like this before. It's a complete first and it's a big thing to do. It won't be filmed, it won't be recorded – you have to be there. The idea is to pay tribute – all these actors are big fans. It's such an important collection."

The performance is planned to last for 78 minutes, said Runcie, with the actors all on stage at once, coming forward in threes to read their choice of poem. "A few have asked if they could do one of the 'angry ones'," said Runcie, who is now finalising the schedule of who is reading what.

Plath herself, in a recording, will read the collection's most famous poem, "Daddy" ("Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through"), with the evening to be introduced by Plath and Ted Hughes's daughter, Frieda Hughes.

"I hope it won't all be doom and gloom, that there will be light and shade there," said Runcie. "Frieda Hughes has made the point that Ariel begins and ends on a positive note – it starts with the word 'love', and ends with 'spring'."

Along with Fainlight – "it's a coup to get her," said Runcie – some of the UK's best known poets including Jo Shapcott and Gillian Clarke will also join the actors for the reading.

"Ariel is one of the greatest collections of poetry ever written; and this is an opportunity to hear her poems in the order she left them at her death: passionate, angry, ferociously observed and yet also hopeful," said Runcie. "I hope this will be an inspiring tribute to both her memory and her achievement."

Many of the poems in my next book are influenced by the artist Helen Chadwick, whose early work made much use of images of her own body until a change in the late 1980s. She wrote: "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body ... It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft." I think I am in love with the word "deft", which seems to me to describe exactly how a poet should be but apart from that I was intrigued by the idea of art that might not declare gender. When I applied the idea to poetry I saw how prescriptive we can be particularly as readers in our assumptions about the influence of gender on writing.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

When he passed out into his tea
he expected to wake up with his nose
warm and wet, lungs topped up
with Earl Grey, snorting

tea leaves which would gather
in the distant networks
of his blood. It might be a relief
to drown that way and not

"Nought may endure but Mutability," wrote Shelley, joining an imposing line of English poets to have tackled this theme of perpetual change, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Wordsworth. Jo Shapcott's new collection her first in 12 years, barring the Rilke translations of Tender Taxes meets the term and its history head-on, even going so far as to call itself Of Mutability, a nod towards the grammar of those predecessors as well as their preoccupations. The excellent title poem, a deceptively casual sonnet, acts as something of a tissue sample for most of the book's concerns, from the mutations of cells to the disruption of the seasons, in a voice as mutable as the phenomena it describes, speaking sympathetically in the year 2004 to those who "feel small among the numbers. Razor small", and suspect the pavement might be about to open under their feet.

Curiously, many of the poems seem more interested in equilibrium than mutability: those moments when opposing forces of change match or negate one another. Bubbles and droplets, which depend upon a perfect balance between internal and external air pressure to maintain their surface tension, bear much of the emblematic weight, appearing literally in a fountain or a stream of piss, or as metaphors for physical experience: "My body's / a drop of water", "the soap film is my skin". Even the poems themselves can feel like bubbles formal, delicate, trembling with immediacy and it seems that Shapcott craves the clarity or guilelessness these metaphors permit: "I breathe in and become everything I see". In a lovely poem about watching a bald female cleaner going about her work, she imagines "every thought visible pure knowledge, / mind in action shining through the skull". Similarly, in "Abishag", a speaker nursing her lover through terminal illness licks his skull and tells us, "I can feel his mind through my tongue / as I trace patterns with the tip across his scalp." These perfectly observed moments of shocking intimacy seem to offer a moment's permeability in the membrane that separates the self from the world, or the self from the other; a chance to slip through the gaps, and commune.

Jo Shapcott has an ear for a title. From the jaunty clank of Electroplating the Baby via Phrase Book's knowing wink to the pointed throat-clearing of 2000's Her Book, she's one of poetry's great encapsulators, able to set the tone of a collection with a choice word or two. "I like titles," she says with a grin, over coffees in a rackety West End café. "With other people's collections, I enjoy reading the title page as if it were a poem itself. For me, I love the process of inventing them: a lot of thought goes in, but they're serendipitous, too. When they come, it's a real thrill. The title is the first sense you get that maybe you've got a book in your hands."

Which is why, when Shapcott unveiled her latest collection, fans knew that something was up. Of Mutability, which was shortlisted this week for the Forward prize, is her first book in almost a decade, and while the title is no less plangent than those that preceded it, an audible tonal shift has occurred; the preposition "of" creates a gap between poet and poem, introducing a new note of reticence. It's lower-pitched than before: less pert, more pensive.

The "disappearance" of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world's most tantalising mysteries. Bizarre theories abounded as to her whereabouts if she was still alive. As the poet Brian Patten put it in a BBC radio feature about her in 2009, she "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat". One contributor imagined her living in Cuba, "smoking cigars in a doorway". Other commentators over the years have made her into a nun; consigned her to a sect; had her communing with the ghost of Charles Baudelaire; or put her in a shed at the bottom of someone's garden. For some reason, these mythmakers always required her to be living in poverty.

Having tried to visit her myself, 10 years ago, I knew all these theories to be far from the truth. But out of respect for her declared wish, maintained by her family, that she should be left in peace, I kept her address and situation secret. Tonks died last month at the age of 85 (all the existing records had her as four years younger). She had indeed been living as a near-recluse but out of choice, quite comfortable in her circumstances. Even so, she remained restless in spirit, defiantly independent and quite alone in her continuing search for God, for she was ever alert to the "brainwashing", manipulative tendencies in the religious groups she encountered.

I was appointed poet laureate for 10 years on 1 May 1999. This means, among other things, that I'm the first person in history apart from John Dryden (who was fired) who is entitled to say "I was poet laureate". A decade is no time at all in the life of poetry, which makes its best judgments with an eye to posterity. But it can seem like a long stretch in the life that surrounds poetry. So let me begin by reminding you what life was like back then. May 1999, two years into Tony Blair's first New Labour government, was the month in which the first elections were held for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly; in which the Kosovo war was still raging; in which the international court at The Hague indicted Slobodan Milosevic; in which the internet was still in its infancy and Bluetooth was first introduced to the world; in which Manchester United beat Bayern Munich to win the Uefa Champions League; in which the FTSE was predicted to rise above 7,000 by the end of the year (today it stands at below 4,000). May 1999 was pre-9/11, pre-Iraq, pre-Afghanistan, pre-global warming (in the sense that it didn't form a part of our daily thinking as it does now), pre-George Bush and pre-Barack Obama. And if that doesn't make it sound like another world, how about this: 1999 was also the year in which Jo Shapcott won the Forward best collection prize for My Life Asleep, in which Ted Hughes won the Whitbread (now Costa) prize with Birthday Letters, and in which the TS Eliot prize was given to Hugo Williams for his collection Billy's Rain. I don't mean that we should be surprised by these titles because they were undeserving. I mean we should be taken aback because they now feel such a settled part of the landscape. They feel so old.

So far, so different. But what about the way these prizes were received - how does that compare with the kind of thing we might expect today? On the face of it, not much has changed. Shapcott's victory was warmly welcomed, but with a lack of fuss that's still typical of most reporting of poetry prizes. They are hushed up, compared with the Booker and the Orange, in much the same way that poetry books are under-reviewed. Having said that, Hughes got a lot of publicity for Birthday Letters - but then he'd lived at the centre of a media storm since his 30s, and six months into his posthumous existence things showed no sign of abating. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of the most remarkable features of the poetic landscape in the past 10 years has been the rise and rise of Hughes's reputation, to the extent that he is now routinely accorded "great poet" status with a lack of scrutiny which frankly does no favour to his achievement. And Hugo Williams? Well, the Guardian was typical of most newspapers in having very little to say about the merits - or even the qualities - of Billy's Rain. "Backbiting and bitterness at the TS Eliot ceremony" was the headline above its piece, which went on to talk about divided opinions among the cognoscenti, and the fact that the drink ran out before the party was due to end. "Fortunately the long-suffering Poetry Book Society poured a couple of hundred quid into the coffers and normal service was resumed."

When he passed out into his tea
he expected to wake up with his nose
warm and wet, lungs topped up
with Earl Grey, snorting

tea leaves which would gather
in the distant networks
of his blood. It might be a relief
to drown that way and not

Eric Berlin wins prestigious award with poem Night Errand, while David Morley takes Ted Hughes prize

A poem exploring the fleeting flashes of anger we direct at our family, and the shame that it brings, has been chosen from more than 12,000 entries for one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry prizes.

Eric Berlin’s poem Night Errand was named winner of the Poetry Society’s 38th national poetry competition, a prize which each year rewards unpublished single poems from a colossal number of entries.

O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle

of upstate New York, your colossal lot

John Clare weaves English words into a nest

and in the cup he stipples rhyme, like mud,

Blending science, fantasy, and feminism, this is an unpretentious work that dances lightly over its weighty concerns

Hairless

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:
it’s newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff,
every thought visible – pure knowledge,
mind in action – shining through the skull.
I saw a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning.
She mopped the green floor, dusted bookshelves,
all cloth and concentration, Queen of the moon.
You can tell, with the bald, that the air
speaks to them differently, touches their heads
with exquisite expression. As she danced
her laundry dance with the motes, everything
she ever knew skittered under her scalp.
It was clear just from the texture of her head,
she was about to raise her arms to the sky;
I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, to roar.