Poetry: The year's best books reviewed

The comforts of madness and middle age

Poetry's a zoo in which you keep demons and angels" said the Australian poet Les Murray. There are plenty of both in this year's crop of poetry books, but the demons tend to dominate, in the lives, if not the work.

John Clare sets the tone. "My life hath been one chain of contradictions/Madhouses Prisons wh-re shops..." he wrote in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in 1841. He was never in prison, but the "Madhouses" and "wh-re shops" did indeed feature prominently in a life fractured by mental illness, poverty and what Michael Douglas would call an "addiction to sex". It is a life examined with luminous clarity in Jonathan Bate's magnificent new book. John Clare: a biography (Picador,£25) is a sympathetic and moving account of the life and work of the poverty-stricken "peasant poet"and one that will be hard to match.

For Yeats, art was "not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality", a belief reflected in a talent for reinvention, extraordinary energy and a dizzying array of eclectic pursuits. R F Foster has spent 15 years of his own life immersed in that of "the arch-poet". Volume II of his magisterial W B Yeats: a life (OUP, £30) takes the poetry, the politics, the mystical and the half-mad in a heady brew that is also consistently judicious.

"Somebody's boring me. I think it's me" said Dylan Thomas during one of many drunken evenings chronicled in Andrew Lycett's Dylan Thomas: a new life (Weidenfeld, £20). Lycett is fascinating on the drink, drama and the spiral of self-destruction of "the Rimbaud of Cwomdonkin Drive", but less good on the work of a poet who produced some of the 20th century's most memorable lyric poems.

Dylan Thomas died at 39, an age now regarded as the first flush of "middle youth". It is certainly an age of astonishing creativity for the cream of our current crop. Don Paterson, Lavinia Greenlaw and Jean Sprackland, all on both the Whitbread and the T S Eliot awards shortlists, are all around 40. Paterson's Landing Light (Faber, £12.99) is a work of fierce intelligence and, at times, breathtaking lyrical beauty. He is one of the few poets writing today whose work combines postmodern playfulness with a sense of yearning for the transcendental. There's playfulness, too, in Lavinia Greenlaw's haunting new collection, Minsk ( also Faber, £12.99). One of the most talented writers of her generation, Greenlaw here writes with hypnotic clarity and startling strangeness about the landscapes of childhood and adolescence .

There's a strangeness edging towards the surreal in Jean Sprackland's fresh and distinctive Hard Water (Cape, £8) and in Ian Duhig's The Lammas Hireling (Picador, £7.99), a work of spectacular weirdness, erudition and wit. Other impressive collections by poets edging inexorably towards middle age include Christopher Reid's Before and After (Faber, £8.99) and Jamie McKendrick's Ink Stone (Faber, £8.99), which combines offbeat fantasy with a gorgeous orientalising delicacy. C K Williams is, cheeringly, still going strong at 70. His new collection, The Singing (Bloodaxe, £7.95) is a fine mix of wry intelligence and lyric intensity.

It is nearly ten years since the "New Generation" poetry promotion launched the idea of a poetry renaissance. Many of these poets, including a number mentioned above, are now the big names in poetry - the establishment, in fact. Dismissed by some as a cynical marketing ploy, "New Gen" did capture a moment of rare excitement that has not, in recent years, been matched. Of this year's crop of debuts, just two stand out: A B Jackson's Fire Stations (Anvil, £7.95) and Jacob Polley's The Brink (Picador, £7.99). Still in his 20s, Polley is a talent to watch.

In spite of valiant efforts from other publishers, Faber continues to bestride the poetry world like a colossus. Like Ted Hughes, in fact (or, at least, the pre-laureate Hughes), whose Collected Poems, (£40, edited by Faber poetry editor, Paul Keegan), just out, brings together all the published work for the first time. Faber also published the magnificent Robert Lowell Collected Poems (£40, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter) and The Poems of Marianne Moore (£30, ed. Grace Schulman), hailed by John Ashbery as "our greatest modern poet" and adored by Auden and Eliot. Here are riches indeed. And for those who yearn for the decadence of yesteryear, there's a new Rimbaud Complete (Scribner, £20), edited and translated by Wyatt Mason. Life is short and so, thank God, are most poems.