Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of wild experimentation, pushing at the bounds of what “poetry” might be thought to be. Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 (CB Editions) is a fabulous example: it takes 12 interviews with a variety of anonymous individuals about the events of that year and presents fragments of the transcripts as prose poems. The cumulative effect of these voices is haunting and full of pathos, as “they vote for whoever, and their life stays exactly the same”.

Luke Kennard and Nick Makoha also daringly remixed their source material and inspirations. The former’s latest collection, The Book of Jonah (Picador), moves the minor prophet out of the Bible into a world of arts conferences, where he is continually reminded that his presence everywhere is mostly futile. Makoha’s The New Carthaginians (Penguin) turns Jean-Michel Basquiat’s idea of the exploded collage into a poetic device. The result? “The visible / making itself known by the invisible.”

Leo Boix’s Southernmost Sonnets (Chatto & Windus) celebrates a more familiar form as it weaves explorations of his native Latin America with ruminations on same-sex marriage. The combination is spellbinding throughout, the images simple yet vivid; Boix is a modern master of using the sonnet to illuminate “each day that passes, the hidden thread that binds us together”.

Pipping it to the Forward prize for best collection this year were two books, the first time the prize has rewarded two winners. Karen Solie’s Wellwater (Picador) doesn’t just decry environmental catastrophe, it also focuses its gaze on the underlying economics that have brought us to this point. Her tone is refreshing, offering comfort only through its clarity: “Under the darkest night skies on Earth / an explanation is not forthcoming.” The other winner, Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe), draws on the poet’s travels to the north of Sri Lanka, where his family are from, and his move to the US. As poems of journeys, they put me in mind at times of James Fenton, while Ravinthiran’s immersion in the English canon means linguistic delights throughout – “rivering, glitch-thronged, dubitable … belied, / believed, beloved”.

Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good (Faber), a dissection of a toxic marriage that is at once playful and sharp, stood alone as the Forward prize’s best first collection. With lines such as “I guess the devil could have swallowed me / if I didn’t have all this ass”, these are poems that absolutely know their power and revel in it. Karen Downs‑Barton’s debut Minx (Chatto & Windus) was similarly eye-catching, unsparingly detailing both the poet’s time in the care system, and the wider discrimination she experienced coming from an Anglo-Romany background. Her use of Roma language in her poems adds an unexpected lushness to the often bleak content.

The most important anthology of the year was Nature Matters (Faber), edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. In showcasing nature poetry by poets of colour, they both radically redefined what the subject could contain and put the political dimension of the environment front and centre. Meanwhile, the arrival of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Faber) was a reminder of his still towering importance, 12 years after his death. Bringing together many previously uncollected poems, this book will be offering riches for years to come.

This was a busy year for poet laureate Simon Armitage. New Cemetery makes use of fast-flowing tercets to reflect on death, while Dwell (both Faber) is the inverse, a joyful testimony to how animals might still thrive in a human-dominated world. And there were two very welcome returns. Gillian Allnutt’s 10th collection, Lode (Bloodaxe), plays with time and memory in works that feel prayer-like in their intimacy and simplicity, while in Foretokens (Chatto & Windus) Sarah Howe adds a bracing anger to her always elegant poems, giving them an unexpected fierceness.

One collection above all others stayed with me this year. Richard Scott’s second book, That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber), is astonishing in how it handles the hardest of subjects, trauma and its aftermath, and finds beauty within. While the bold remixing of Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress would be achievement enough, the ekphrastic poems inspired by a variety of still lives are some of the best examples of the technique I’ve ever read, connecting pain to painting in ways that mesmerise: “So much crisp hurt in these / blue petals. And always the bloom’s corolla as a schoolboy’s face.” It stands as one of the bravest and most brilliant collections of this or any year.

• To browse all poetry books included in the Guardian’s best books of 2025, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.