If anyone tries to tell you how good a poet is, or how wonderful hisher latest book is, just say: “Show me the good poem. Don’t tell me what it’s about or how clever it is, just get me the one that sticks in your mind.”

This is the ultimate reader’s challenge, and it is what the Forward Prize judges are asked to do every year. This is why the Forward book is always such an outstanding bargain of an anthology.

What happens when you look for a good poem, rather than admiring the most recent shiny volume from the most prestigious publishing houses? Relative unknowns grab the eye, famous names have to battle for their page-worth of time. The shortlist for best individual poem gives some idea of the breadth of the anthology: two are from Poetry London, one from The Shop, and one, Jane Draycott’s “No 3 from Uses of the Thames” was written during a Southern Arts residency at Henley River and Rowing Museum.

If there is a highlight, it might be this: “The test was to dip the needles into the dark of the swallowing mirror and by pulling to row the weight of your own small self through the silvery jam of its surface trailing behind in your passing your very own tale, knitted extempore from light and then to lift them, feathered, ready for flight.”

Unless it is the close of Ian Duhig’s “Rosary” - “How individual pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, If left too near a fire, shrink from it and start To reassume the shape of the calves they parted from, And I know if I ask he’ll tell me all their names.”

The mix gets seriously interesting in the section of highly commended poems, where Simon Armitage is under starter’s orders with the rest, between “Dead Cat Poem” from Ann Alexander out of Peterloo and Jonathan Asser’s excellently pacy “Lost in Bayswater”.

Caroline Bird, a recent winner of the Young National Poetry Competition, makes an early foray into the adult prize world with “Multitude”. This is the section where you can go from enjoying a new voice to giving a well-known but less-loved poet a second chance - maybe I was wrong about John Burnside? I’m still unconvinced, preferring Gordon Day’s strange and suitably disjointed “843” from North 30 as a response to the big news story of the past year: “mayfly n. adult of brief life but many flying hours.”

Sian Hughes is former education officer with the Poetry Society. The Forward Prizes will be presented on October 9, the eve of National Poetry Day. See page 30 for more details of the day