Christmas 2012: Poetry of the year One day in the future, when English teachers go into their classrooms and pull the trick of reciting a poem by William Carlos Williams - the one about eating cherries, perhaps - students will no longer say, "No way is that a poem," but will instead respond with, "He's playing with your expectations; get over it." Until that day, there will still be a frisson from the found poem, the poem in prose, the poem whose line-breaks turn up in odd places and the strangely conversational poem. All will seem new, so long as the technique or tone seems new. Andrew Motion has worked hard to make us more used to these things. Even in his laureate poems, he advertised poetry's potential to take on new forms. One collection from that period, called, pointedly or generously, Public Property, was a masterclass in the intimate, the confessional, the narrative. His craft is clear in his latest book, The Customs House (Faber, £12.99). It opens with a sequence of poems, many of which are responses or reworkings of prose sources, all commemorating the horror of war or, just as often, its flashes of valour, ranging from Flanders to Afghanistan. Some of the best involve the reassuring, innocent workings of nature, so we meet an OiCoG (Officer in Charge of Goats, who is "resourcing" them as part of Op Billy), and Captain John Buxton who, observing the birds around him, could claim "no pair of birds has ever been watched so closely" as the redstarts he studied for 850 hours. Other poems in the volume take on voices more boldly, such as the dying architect Francesco Borromini, and a whale swimming through history. The precision and flexibility of Kathleen Jamie's syntax is a wonder. In The Overhaul (Picador, £9.99) she leads luxuriant sentences through short lines towards more visions of nature and landscape, some of which yield universal truths to her, but which are just as likely to be more personal revelations. One compares a hawk with the poet's soul, called, with satisfying understatement, "her mate on the ground." She is not twitching for Windhovers, or climbing Mont Blanc; the moon she sees is not so much epiphanic or healing as vaguely unsettling. These visions of the world around her are all the more powerful for not being sublime; and her versions of Hölderlin into Scots do much to tame a poet whose view of language could almost be too reverent. Here the words settle into the cadences of a lullaby. 81 Austerities by Sam Riviere (Faber, £9.99), which won this year's Forward Prize for best first collection, does everything it can to tell the reader that here is a fresh approach to poetry. Not only are there technological references to spanking new kit, but the sequence of pieces, called "austerities" in response to the Coalition's programme of cuts, began life online. The subject matter - beauty, boredom, pornography, and poetry itself - would have had a special resonance if chanced upon when browsing the net. In book form, though, the levels of postmodernism begin to seem try-hard. It's a shame, because the staccato, punky language has some smart lines of its own, and there's a bracing nastiness to the sharpest sections. In his introduction to the 2013 Forward Book of Poetry (Forward, £8.99), William Sieghart notes, "we have a barn, birds, bees... McDonald's (twice) ... poems set in France, Wisconsin and (twice) Peckham." These annual anthologies of the poems in the running for the Forward Prize remain the best way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer, from the Olympian Geoffrey Hill, writing about love, almost approachably this time, to Michael Longley, Denise Riley and James Fenton (who writes in memory of Mick Imlah). Although the volume's USP is that it is so contemporary, there are many poems that will surely end up in later anthologies.