Poems sharing the qualities of “a lit-up, living language” and a ”sense of purpose” make up the Forward poetry prize shortlists announced today, according to judging panel chair Jeanette Winterson. The contenders for the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Collection are Rebecca Goss, Glyn Maxwell, Sinead Morrissey, Jacob Polley and Michael Symmons Roberts. The shortlisted poets for the £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection are Emily Berry, Marianne Burton, Steve Ely, Hannah Lowe, Dan O’Brien and Adam White.  The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem shortlist features Patience Agbabi, CJ Allen, Neil MacKinnon, Rosie Shepperd and Hugo Williams.

 In the Best Collection category, Her Birth by Rebecca Goss is an autobiographical sequence about the poet’s daughter, born with an incurable heart condition. Glyn Maxwell’s Pluto looks at the before-and-after of love and the underworld of internet dating. Sinead Morrissey’s Parallax examines what is caught and lost in the time-freezing act of photography. The Havocs by Jacob Polley conjures horror and unsettling comedy from traditional forms. The 21st century psalms of Michael Symmons Roberts’ Drysalter move from toll booths and karaoke clubs to the financial markets, noting the world’s “unceasing ability to surprise”.

 The Best First Collection shortlist includes publications from two independent presses. Doire Press in Connemara (Adam White, Accurate Measurements) and Smokestack Press in Middlesbrough (Steve Ely, Oswald’s Book of Hours)  take on three of the biggest brands in poetry publishing, Faber & Faber (Emily Berry, Dear Boy), Bloodaxe Books (Hannah Lowe, Chick) and Seren Books (Marianne Burton, She Inserts the Key).

Emily Berry writes wittily disturbing soliloquies; Marianne Burton, a former City solicitor, juxtaposes sparrowhawks and the Bank of England; Steve Ely, a Yorkshire headteacher, offers a 7th century Northumbrian martyr as England’s alternative patron saint; Hannah Lowe writes of her father, a Chinese-Jamaican professional gambler; the American playwright Dan O’Brien creates a “documentary-poem” from interviews with a traumatised Pulitzer prize-winning war-reporter; and Adam White, an Irish joiner, brings a craftsman’s precision to stanzas built to withstand all climates.

You can read Cato Pedder’s recent Write out Loud review of Emily Berry’s Dear Boy here, and a review by Frances Spurrier of Marianne Burton’s She Inserts the Key here.

The other members of the judging panel are: actor/director Samuel West, journalist David Mills and poets Paul Farley and Sheenagh Pugh.

Sheenage Pugh commented on Facebook: "I think the main principle at the judging meeting was an agreement that we didn't need to totally agree, ie we weren't looking poems so anodyne that no one could dislike them but rather for ones that someone, (well, two or three someones) would be passionate about. Looking at the three lists, I can see that on each, there are at least two I'm passionately in favour of and one I don't like at all, and from my recollection of the discussion, that is probably true for t'other judges..... I think this is better than lists that all five judges quite liked. But of course, it'll be as it always is with contests, people far and wide will be saying 'how on earth did they overlook so-and-so?'?" 

The prizes will be awarded on 1 October at London’s Southbank Centre. Tickets for the event, at which Samuel West and other celebrated actors will read poetry from the shortlist, are now on sale. The 22nd annual Forward Book of Poetry, containing the judges’ choice of the best of the year’s poems, will be launched on the same day.