Going toe to toe... the shortlist for the 2007 Costa Coffee book of the year. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

While the smart money for this year's ultimate Costa Coffee award will be on William Boyd, who has just been announced this evening as winner of the best novel section and one of Richard and Judy's anointed, I'll be putting my fiver on tonight's winner of the poetry section, John Haynes.

This might seem an act of romantic recklessness tantamount to backing a three-legged horse just because it's piebald. After all, nobody reads poetry any more - they only write it. The Book of the Year award has gone to poetry on only five occasions in the history of what was the Whitbread - twice each to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. And what could be more unsexy than a book-length poem, written over 52 stanzas in the straitjacket of terza rima? But Haynes's form is deceptive, and anyone who can beat a shortlist of Hugo Williams, Vicki Feaver and Heaney deserves a proper look.

Haynes is certainly the outsider of the four, and he is published by the small Welsh imprint Seren. Letter to Patience is presented as the thoughts of the poet over a single night addressed to the eponymous owner of Patience's Bar, where Haynes himself used to drink while he was working at a university in northern Nigeria, which he did for 18 years. It is the work of a man suspended between two worlds - physically in one, imaginatively in another - aware that "Your cooking fire / keeps time with these computer clicks."

Some in the fastidious poetry world may see his work as exploitative in its relationship with Africa (he even wrote one collection in the 1980s under the pseudonum of Idi Bukar, in "a sort of attempt at some sort of humble solidarity with the likes of Ngugi wa thiong'o and the critics of African dictators and misrulers"). But Haynes - married to a Nigerian, and a translator of Hausa poetry - has an investment in the country and its culture that goes beyond that of the average post-colonialist, and that is richly reflected in Letter to Patience.

As Jeremy Noel-Tod wrote in the Guardian: "As a poet of autobiographical realism on a grand scale, Haynes is the equal of Muldoon, Heaney or Hill, while his philosophical self-effacement is all his own."