"Pelt" is taken from Michael Symmons Roberts' 2004 collection Corpus, which won the Whitbread poetry prize. The first poem in the collection, it sets out the themes that haunt the book: bodies, dead and living, real and imagined, earthbound and resurrected

Taken from her 2010 collection Rough Music, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward prizes, this poem from Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson captures a moment of "beautiful exception" - then slantingly interrogates our need to memorialise such moments before they're passed

'Strangers on a Tram' is taken from Fleur Adcock's 2010 collection Dragon Talk, which deals with the first 20 years of the poet's life. A prickly little poem of adolescence, its speaker is at first embarrassed into ignoring her mother when she appears unexpectedly on a tram, and then irritated when her mother seems to understand her discomfiture

In 'Honour Killing', taken from her 2001 collection I Speak For the Devil, Imtiaz Dharker - who describes herself as a 'cultural mongrel' takes on the vexed twin subjects of religion and identity

In this remarkable and powerful narrative poem, which won the Forward prize for best single poem in 2009, Robin Robertson delves into Scottish folklore to invoke the myth of the selkie - seal-creatures who can take on human form by shedding their skins, but are doomed to remain human forever if their skin is stolen

In this poem by the Scottish Makar Liz Lochhead, a woman visits the house of another woman whom she casts in the role of combatant

Liverpool-born poet Paul Farley reads his poem Treacle from his award-winning first collection The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998)

Jo Shapcott, winner of the Costa book of the year award for Of Mutability, reads her poem I Go Inside the Tree

In the first of a new series of poets reading their own work to camera, Simon Armitage presents a tale of estranged partners dividing their space