As well as picking out collections for the Observer’s monthly column, I have, this year, been a judge (with Andrew O’Hagan and Jen Campbell) of the Costa poetry award. We were all struck, as we read through diverse submissions, by the way women’s voices have dominated 2016, and our shortlist (Denise Riley, Alice Oswald, Kate Tempest and Melissa Lee-Houghton) confirms this. The TS Eliot prize shortlist adds other names: Rachael Boast, Ruby Robinson, Katharine Towers. This year’s Forward prize was won by Vahni Capildeo for Measures of Expatriation – an innovative work about displacement and identity that excites strong feelings and divides opinion. If I could have had my way, our shortlist would have been longer – but I cannot imagine it being more powerful.

Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (Picador £9.99) was the year’s most thrilling discovery. Riley has been writing for years but with this book she steps to the front of the stage. She is remarkable in that she never loses her own plot, does not allow grief over the death of her son (the subject that drives her poems) to engulf or disfigure the writing. She can stand outside herself – and if she is saying something back to the woman she observes, it is likely to be clear-eyed, tart, exacting. Riley’s grief is tailored and personal in contrast to the all-encompassing urgency of Kate Tempest in her phenomenal Let Them Eat Chaos (Picador £9.99). Tempest is a tempest here, a conductor of voices and a lightning conductor as she writes about seven sleepless people in London, tormented by a world gone awry in a gathering storm. Both books have an imperative quality – they are must-reads.

Alice Oswald’s relationship with nature is rooted in knowledge. As a young woman she worked as a gardener and there is, in all her work, a sense that her thoughts are planted, rooted, cultivated – the product of waiting and time. Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape £10) is a miraculous collection and a new departure, not because it explores nature and mythology (the green and Greek have always been Oswald territory), but because of the many moments that might have remained wordless were Alice Oswald not there to see – and write.

I feel I need to take a deep breath before trying to describe Melissa Lee-Houghton. The poems in Sunshine (Penned in the Margins £9.99), written after two and a half years in psychiatric hospitals, out-Plath Sylvia – they are harrowing, raw and so charged with pain that at the end of each poem, literary comment seems beside the point. Poetry is Lee-Houghton’s lifeline. Her encounters with doctors have particular ferocity:

“I am nothing to you but a risk you chanced and lost –

a broken little girl who exists on a diet of solitude and nihilism,/ whose therapists all gave up after five sessions of/my deflection of the pointlessness of their/neuro-scientific cognitive-behavioural training.

So fix me, puma –

or start locking my cage.”

Poetry can exist on the verges of madness and be a lifeline. 2016 was also a year for calmer work. Alison Brackenbury’s Skies (Carcanet £9.99) contains several poems equivalent to a delicious country meal (parsnips, honey, Bramley apples all on the menu) and her technical mastery is a delight, with last lines that deliver poems as pleasingly as any punch line. Katharine Towers captivated me with The Remedies (Picador £9.99) – a collection of modest brilliance in which she takes each of Dr Bach’s 1930s flower remedies and imagines how it would be were the flower afflicted with the malaise it was intended to cure. I will consult her poetic remedies beyond 2016. And as for Sharon Olds’s Odes – no space to elaborate here. But hats off to a living legend.

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