If it were up to the audience, Dannie Abse would have been named the runaway winner of the TS Eliot Prize, for the best collection of poetry published in 2013. The cheers and roars as the 90-year-old departed from the stage at the Royal Festival Hall after reading poems from Speak, Old Parrot  were evidence of that. And the audience clapometer would have made young Helen Mort a honourable runner-up, too. The interest and enthusiasm that this prize now attracts is plain. Compere Ian McMillan said more tickets for the event, organised by the Poetry Book Society and supported for many years by Valerie, late widow of TS Eliot, had been sold than ever before. The prize money of £15,000 – “millions, in poetry prize terms”, observed McMillan - and £1,000 for each of the other nine shortlisted poets, is now provided by the Eliot trustees.

The 10 shortlisted candidates – Daljit Nagra, Moniza Alvi, Maurice Riordan, Anne Carson (read on her behalf by Ruth Padel),  Michael Symmons Roberts, Dannie Abse, Helen Mort, George Szirtes, Sinead Morrissey, and Robin Robertson – read in turn.

Daljit Nagra employed four other speakers, including his wife, to help read a chapter of his translation and rejuvenation of the Ramayana, one of the great Hindu epics. He explained that he had tried to read as many of the thousands of versions as he could, adding that he had brought in a bit of incest “tastefully”.

Moniza Alvi delivered heartrending and horrifying lines in reading excerpts from her book-length poem, At the Time of Partition,  about separated families, “as it happened to so many”, and the appalling violence inflicted by  Hindu and Muslim communities during the division of India and Pakistan.

Maurice Riordan included an audience-pleasing poem, ‘Gone With The Wind’, from his collection The Water Stealer, about the problems of remembering the names of people, rather than places, and in particular, the names of movie stars. “Don’t call out the answers, please,” he told the audience.

Ruth Padel read on behalf of American Anne Carson, from Carson’s collection Red Doc and apologised for the fact that she felt unable to adequately convey the humour of Carson’s lines.

Michael Symmons Roberts has already won the Forward and Costa prizes for Drysalter,  150 poems each of 15 lines. The title refers to the ancient trade of a form of alchemy, but also to the psalter. He said it was an honour “to read in such fine company tonight”.  Could he win a  third prize, in addition to the Forward and the Costa?  As he read, it seemed quite possible.

Dannie Abse, the audience favourite, stumbled occasionally over the odd consonant, and, on one occasion, as he self-mockingly complained  “I’ve only got eight minutes!”, sounded a little like a grumbling Spike Milligan. Poems from Speak, Old Parrot,  about shrubs planted by his late wife and  copulating cats in Turkey, earned appreciative murmurs from the audience, and a storm of applause as he concluded.

Helen Mort’s first collection, Division Street,  has a famous picture by the late Guardian photographer Don McPhee capturing a rare moment of humour during the miners’ strike  - the closest this country has come in modern times to a kind of civil war - as her cover. She read from ‘Scab’, about the battle of Orgreave during the strike, and its artistic re-enactment  as the 1984-85 dispute that ended in the miners’ defeat becomes part of Britain’s modern legend and history. Mort ws born in 1985. 

George Szirtes confessed, in reading a poem from his Bad Machine collection, that he was “in love with the names of colours”, and that, in the poem, he had “invented most of them”. With shades like Fondle, Golightly, and Indignant, you could hear what he meant. 

Sinead Morrissey’s poem,  ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, from Parallax, was inspired by the film title, which she saw while going into labour with her first child. The film’s theme was paralleled by her own experience of a grandmother dying just before her baby was born.

Robin Robertson wryly introduced poems from his collection, Hill of Doors, by saying that that autobiographical ‘1964’, about his childhood in the “cold fishing town” of Aberdeen during a time of typhoid, had eight sections, “each grimmer than the last”. He ended with ‘The Key’: “This is my only cheerful poem, and therefore very short.”

It only remains to say that each of the poets read their poetry superbly. As you might expect.

* You can hear the readings here