The relatively recent publishing makeover of annual anthologies of the shorter literary forms – poetry, short stories, essays – is serving poetic production well. An expert and catholic selection of the year’s poetry, like Adamson’s, is free of the old aesthetic divides and redoubts that can hamper the big national anthology. It also lends the shorter forms the kind of cultural influence it is difficult for them to build, from week to week, given that novels, and profiles of novelists, tend to dominate the Saturday supplement and review pages, as well as taking up most of the oxygen on television book shows.

The heritage version of this packaging of Australian writing was the Angus & Robertson annual Australian Poetry series and the short story annual Coast to Coast, both published on and off from the 1940s to the 1970s. Black Inc.’s Best Australian Poems series began in 2003, and takes its cue more from Simon & Schuster’s annual Best American Poetry series, which has been going for nearly a quarter of a century now.

As an innovative independent Australian publisher, Black Inc. has extended its horizontal integration to include attractively boxed sets of its three ‘Best Australian’ annuals, not unlike boxed sets of television series, or multiple CD sets of live concerts. Good to see poetry as part of a great gift idea. The success of Black Inc.’s annual anthologies, though, seems to have driven UQP’s competing annual Best Australian Poetry anthologies, which ran from 2003 to 2009, from the market, which is a shame. They were also always well done.

But it’s not just about packaging. Of the 108 poets published here, Adamson draws attention to the fact that forty-nine were not included in the 2009 annual. This is a different and fresh reading of the year’s work in poetry. There is no doubt that the strength of this collection lies in the remarkable varietal difference of the poems themselves. Adamson is a careful and wide-ranging anthologiser, with a cultivated allergy to cliché and fossilised poetic effects. Some readers may find the risky and puzzling uses of language in the great majority of these poems a challenge, but get with it, that’s where good poetry is going today, exuberantly against the tide of those degraded forms of language: information, data, communication. As you would expect from Adamson, as well, there is always a serious element of craft at work in every one of these poems.

In what is a very engaging introduction, Adamson shares his wonder at the various accidents of theme and style that the year’s poetry seems to present. There were apparently numerous poems about bats, three of which he includes, by Martin Harrison, Debbie Lim, and Andrew Slattery, all memorably effective at capturing the astonishment of their encounters. And goats: both John Kinsella and Anthony Lawrence have striking goat poems here. Kinsella’s is an act of empathy with an injured, feral beast, a goat who ‘comes down and watches / us over its shoulder, shits on the wall of the rainwater / tank – our lifeline – and hobbles off / to where it prays, where it makes art’. Adamson also makes a point of acknowledging the important groundwork of poetry publishing being done in the journals, particularly Meanjin, with its early support of Susan Fealy and Claire Potter.

It is no surprise that Adamson’s eye was caught by poems about birds, literal and otherwise (macaws, sparrows, gannets). His description of Barry Hill’s poem about gannets as a stunning performance is right: ‘the arrowhead / beak or spear tip: a streamlined weapon that owns the head.’ Lucy Dougan’s ‘Guillemots’ takes the opposite message from nature: a warm recognition of mothering instincts across species.

Every reader will have his or her own standouts, but for me they were these: Bruce Dawe’s ‘Eventide’, in the collective first person of the aged, remonstrating with an unheeding ‘they’, the ‘caring’ younger generations who want the old folks to do the ‘sensible thing’ and move into a room with one of the family or the ‘Sunset Retirement Centre’. With its mordant humour – ‘we’re near the terminus’ – this poem is as good as any of Dawe’s classic anthology pieces. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum is Astrid Lorange’s ‘Attraction’, a brilliant and mercurially shifting set of perceptual notes, open to any level and angle of language. Pam Brown’s ‘Spirulina to Go’ is about illness, even suffering, but this is only intermittently discernible behind the wit and microscopic attention to the weirdly transient details of modern life: dietary supplements of slightly dubious provenance, scraps of Bob Dylan lyrics, medical régimes.

There are poems about politicians (Jennifer Maiden on Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton), personal confession, space travel, translations of Yankunytjatjara love poems, dreamscapes, social protest, well-made poems of quiet reflection, ∏.O’s surrealist, laugh-out-loud ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ (‘A cigar was originally a rabbit leaf ... stuffed with tobacco’), gimlet-eyed observation (Rhyll McMaster’s ‘In the Inner West’), joanne burns’s tourist surreal, remediated language (John Tranter’s ‘Rink’), each an utterly distinctive window into alternative worlds of perception and meaning. They remind the reader of poetry as attention-seeking behaviour, but in a good way: ‘this is how I see the world.’

Perhaps most pervasively, these are poems about language itself. Adamson doesn’t remark on this in his introduction, but he could hardly have failed to notice. The first poem in the collection announces this preoccupation forcefully: Ali Alizadeh’s bristling, subversive challenge to the ‘monoglot Master’ of any official language. Many of these poems share the dream of an uncommon language, like Luke Davies’ headlong ‘Cutter Sutra’, or the remarkable soundscapes of Carol Jenkins’s ‘Perianthetical Apple, Cherry, Plum’ and Justin Clemens’s ‘Sound Urn: Sonnet to Orpheus #5’, which makes English sound like a foreign language.

Perhaps the most impressive of the soundscapes here are three poems of Judith Beveridge’s from a sequence called ‘Devadatta’s poems’. ‘Ground Swell’, almost prim in its descriptive restraint, manages at the same time to sound like audio clips of insect sounds: ‘So many insects / loose in the wind, loose in the grasses, / loose in the mustard, loose in the thistles and furze; … a blur, a flurry / over witch hazel, / hyssop, trillium and mallow.’

The Best Australian Poems 2010 is an absorbing and multifaceted report from the land of poetry, a place of rapid, contingent, puzzling meanings, where language is not what you think.