It's a great time to be a poetry reader

Where do I start? (L to R) Simon Armitage, Amir Or, John Fuller, Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke at last year"s Hay festival Poetry Gala.    Photograph: Martin Godwin

In an end-of-year summing-up in The Guardian the other week, Giles Foden commented that it had not been a good decade for poetry. I think he"s mistaken. Apologies: here come some lists.

This decade has seen the publication of Jo Shapcott"s Tender Taxes, Don Paterson"s Landing Light, Kathleen Jamie"s The Tree House, David Harsent"s Legion, Derek Mahon"s Harbour Lights, Peter Didsbury"s Scenes from a Long Sleep, Ian Duhig"s The Lammas Hireling, Ken Smith"s Collected Poems: Shed, Roy Fisher"s The Long and the Short of it, Lavinia Greenlaw"s Minsk, new works by Edwin Morgan, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, as well as a range of translations from many periods by poets including Heaney, Michael Hoffman, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.

I"d suggest that would be sufficient to commend the decade, but if not, here"s more. Not only have poets of the older generation (including Anne Stevenson, Geoffrey Hill, Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley, Peter Porter, Tony Harrison, EA Markham and Mimi Khalvati) gone on writing superbly, and those of the middle generation (such as Simon Armitage, John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Glyn Maxwell, Matthew Sweeney, Moniza Alvi, Sarah Maguire, Jane Draycott, Paul Farley, Vicki Feaver, Robin Robertson, Anne Rouse, John Kinsella, Maurice Riordan and George Szirtes) continued to impress.

And there has also been a stream of very gifted newer writers appearing from several imprints; the independents – Anvil, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Donut, Salt, Seren and so on – as well as the large houses. It would be impossible to list all of them, but a sample of recommendations would include Frances Leviston, Daljit Nagra, Gabeba Baderoon, John McAuliffe, Fiona Sampson, Jacob Polley, Polly Clark, Julia Copus, Alan Gillis, James Sheard, Tim Turnbull, Annie Freud, Greta Stoddart, Suzanne Batty, Paul Bachelor (first collection The Sunken Road imminent from Bloodaxe), Sasha Dugdale and Colette Bryce.

There are those who protest that it"s against nature for so much work to be worth reading. I would simply suggest setting about it and finding out for yourself.

About 15 years ago, I think, the word "mainstream" gained new currency in the discussion of poetry. As tends to be the case, the momentarily convenient term became an imprisoning category, with mainstream used to corral poets who wrote for the page rather than performance, and whose work was not self-consciously avant-garde. Elsewhere lay the realm of the performance poets, and elsewhere again the avant-gardistes.

There"s a book to be written about this, which I"m thankful I won"t be undertaking, but one consequence has been a tendency to view the alleged occupants of these sometimes antagonistic camps as homogeneous; thus, for example, "mainstream" poetry is said to be "all the same". But when I listened to my nine colleagues" work at the TS Eliot reading the other evening, what struck me was its range and diversity, and the complexity of its relationship to tradition, as well as its quality.

The intimate lyricism of Mimi Khalvati is not "the same" as the alert charting of perception in Fiona Sampson or the rich particularity of Sarah Maguire. Belfast-born Alan Gillis, London-Irish Ian Duhig and Donegal"s Matthew Sweeney spring from the same imaginative soil yet find utterly different forms. The wit of Sophie Hannah and the dramatic lyrics of Frances Leviston serve the one art from very different positions, while the scale, range and formal delight of Edwin Morgan"s work are so large as to contain the rest of us several times over.

The names above are a sample taken on a particular occasion. There"s more, far more than could be read in a lifetime, and more will follow. We should enjoy it: that"s what it"s there for.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/01/its_a_great_time_to_be_a_poetr.html