The star perched atop the poetry Christmas tree this year is unquestionably Carol Ann Duffy, who has not only published her first poetry collection since her appointment as the UK's inaugural female poet laureate, but has also had the chutzpah to overturn centuries of tradition and do it brilliantly. Her predecessor Andrew Motion was frank about the fact that he found the job "very, very damaging" to his writing; he endured a five-year spell of writer's block, and has only recently picked up his pen again. But on the evidence of The Bees (Faber, £14.99), Duffy's first two years in office have acted as a spur to her poetry, rather than a suppressant. The collection, which has been shortlisted for the Costa poetry award, offers a joyful grab-bag of form and subject, mixing the lyric with the deadpan, the political with the elegiac  and all buzzed about with the bees of the title.

Not content with publishing one of the finest novels of the year in A Summer of Drowning (Jonathan Cape), John Burnside has also succeeded in dominating the poetry scene too, taking the Forward prize this year with Black Cat Bone (Cape, £10)  as a three-time former shortlistee, victory must have tasted particularly good. The collection marks a slight but unmistakable shift for Burnside, whose work in the past has been distinguished by its devotion to the transcendental. "I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak," he said in an interview this summer. "This book is about things that nobody can deny  it still deals with the evanescent, but it's about sex, love, death  solid, real-life things."

New works from Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald both look back to poetic forebears. Oswald's Memorial (Faber, £12.99) is a deft and plangent reworking of Homer's Iliad, in which the central narrative of Achilles's and Agamemnon's great quarrel has been taken out in order to allow the lives of the footsoldiers to rise to the surface. In the wake of his masterful translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, meanwhile, Armitage has returned to Arthurian Britain with a gorgeously produced translation of a barely known medieval poem, The Death of King Arthur (Faber, £12.99). Following the characters so beautifully realised as headstrong youths in Gawain into sombre, tactical middle age, it tells the bloodstained tale of Arthur's annexation of swaths of mainland Europe, and his final, grievous fall.

In a year which saw new collections from several of the UK's leading poetry lights, Sean O'Brien's November (Picador, £8.99) and David Harsent's Night (Faber, £9.99) are both examples of poets working at the top of their game  and both sufficiently tenebrous to offer perfect fare for a murky winter's evening. Harsent's long, loping lines coil duskily around ruby-bright glimpses of neon windows and life in lamplit rooms. November  which sits, tonally, as a sequel to O'Brien's board-sweeping 2005 collection The Drowned Book (Picador)  returns to the battered and broken post-industrial northern landscapes that the poet has made his own. But this is a softer, sadder volume than the last; less truculent, more vulnerable. The poem "Elegy", written for O'Brien's mother, is one of the best I've read all year, in any collection.

But the old guard don't have the field entirely to themselves. Former Forward first collection prize-winner Daljit Nagra returned this year with his follow-up collection, Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger ToyMachine!!! (Faber, £12.99), which was every bit as rambunctious, uplifting and larded with exclamation marks as his highly-praised debut, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber). And 2011 also saw the publication of one of the most impressive poetry debuts in recent years. Rachael Boast's Sidereal (Picador, £8.99), which won the Forward prize for best first collection, is a revelation. Lyrical, lilting, full of rainfall and starlight (the title refers to the motion of constellations across the heavens), it is nevertheless refreshingly rigorous: curious, questioning, and shot through with mordant humour. Expect a great deal more from her in years to come.

 What poetry books would you give?

In Carol Ann Duffy's new collection, bees represent virtue. They pop up, hither and thither, like good fairies. The book has a honeycomb structure. But it becomes apparent that this is an ambitious miscalculation: the metaphor cannot take the weight of what it is being asked to carry. The sense that bees are directing the material is a further cause for unease. When the last line of her first poem, "Bees", concludes: "honey is art," it is far too easily earned  a sticky image  and not true. Her bees leave a trail of puns  beelines and buzzwords  behind them. But what is never clear is how Carol Ann Duffy's bonnet became so troubled  or blessed as she would have it  by bees. Perhaps it is that she sees poems as endangered? Whatever the case, this highly wrought collection is her most uneven and busiest (as befits a bee) so far. She has such remarkable gifts as a poet of grace, dexterity and clarity. And there are poems here that are unforced and beautiful: gifts. But what one mostly feels is that this is a worker bee/ laureate that is overworking and needs a rest.

It is easy to see why she might be in overdrive: she is a born laureate because she can write to order (as few poets can) and with ingenious diligence. In "Last Post"  written for surviving soldiers  she salutes Wilfred Owen, puts the first world war into reverse and imagines a way back to peace. It is a brave, super-competent performance. "New Vows", a more private poem, involves a comparable reversal. It works backwards to untie the knot:

From this day forth to unhold,

to see the nothing in ringed gold

uncare for you when you are old.

The verbs are out in sympathy: disunited. And "Valentine" also gets the treatment: the opposite of an infatuated greeting: an angry, unravelling, backwards glance. Reversals are a theme.

Duffy has always had a tremendous feeling for names, a collector's relish. In one of her best known poems, "Prayer", she turned the Radio 4 shipping forecast into something sublime:

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer.

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Poetic offspring are everywhere  the family likeness unmistakable. A poem about clouds ends:

 love goes naming,

even a curl of hair  thus, Cirrus.

Cumulus. Stratus. Nimbus.

"Finisterre" closed "Prayer" as surely as any Amen. "Nimbus" is irresolute  perhaps the nature of clouds is to blame. And "Counties" rattles through names of counties before lamely concluding: "But I want to write the names of the Counties down for my own child and may they never be lost to her." By far the most successful of the name-rich poems is "John Barleycorn"  a dazzling pub crawl  or gallop:

He moved through Britain, bright and dark/ like ale in glass. I saw him run across the fields/ towards the Gamekeeper, the poacher and the Blacksmith's Arms. / He knew the Ram, the Lamb, the Lion and the Swan, / White Hart, Blue Boar, Red Dragon, Fox and Hounds.

There does not seem to have been a pub called the Bee.

Knowing how to write a poem is not the same as having a poem to write. Some pieces here have a slightly random fairytale quality. Duffy is at her best when most personal. When she has a real subject  the death of her mother  the difference is overwhelming. Contrivance no longer has the upper hand. "Water" is perfectly controlled, yet written with what could almost be mistaken for casualness. It carries its emotional weight effortlessly. It acknowledges three generations, needing one another in ordinary ways. The "parched" at the end is beautiful and unlaboured. In every sense, it holds water.

In Rapture in 2005, Carol Ann Duffy wrote a fevered volume-length hymn to the "glamorous hell" of a love affair. Then, after the death of her mother in that same year, she could, she said, for the longest while write no poems except those for children.

She's back now, with a collection that is wonderfully varied for someone who's had, in the past, a bit of a penchant for the book with a theme. Here's a mixter maxter of every kind of Duffy poem: angry, political, elegiac  elegiac about every endangered or disappearing thing in the natural world or the individual psyche  witty, nakedly honest, accessible, mysterious. Here are the willed, the skilled, the passionate ecological pleas and exhortations, the other voices  though less frequent than before  the lists and litanies, and, above all, the lovely lyrics of longing and loneliness and sorrow laced with ephemeral moments of almost-acceptance, lightness and grace.

In The Bees she sings a love song to the lyric muse. A true votaress, she here vows fidelity to the art of Virgil and Sappho, to the purity of her vocation: to sing "childbirth's song, the lover's song, the song of death".

The examples of the latter will sting you to tears. The elegies for that much-missed mother are the most moving poems in the whole book. "Cold" will stop your own heart for a moment. While in the briefly consoling fiction of "Premonitions" time is going backwards, nevertheless Duffy is clear-eyed about the ordinary, universal, mundane things: " the slow weeks removing the wheelchair, the drugs, / the oxygen mask and tank, the commode, / the appointment cards".

Again and again, in songs of renunciation and loss ("Ballynahinch", "New Vows" and "Valentine's", with its bitter brio) we find that the  implicit  answer to "what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?" is: go on, sing it.

"Sung", a perfect wee lyric take on Burns's "Mary Morison" (even the name on the overgrown gravestone is turned into a Sappho-like fragment here), says, in its last couplet, that the song's the thing that will survive: " a skull for a bonnie head /  and love a simile, a rose, red, red".

Other notes are struck, good fun stuff. At the end of the deadpan and surreal "The Human Bee" it's great to get the rock'n'roll riff of " I'd known love / and I'd saved some money / but I could not fly and I made no honey". Try saying that aloud without going all Buddy Holly.

Duffy is brazen enough to write words such as besotted, smitten (several times), enchantment, legend, shadow, soul, garlanded and (again and again) moon, and to bring it all off brilliantly. To float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. A word of warning, though: don't guzzle all these poems at once or they'll cloy. Sip and dip. Poetry, like honey, is the product of toil and craft but, after the willed alchemy, still has to slip down easy. And when it comes to "Cockermouth and Workington", with its second stanza "Fouled fortune followed, / but families filed into the fold / for a fire flared", the "???" pencilled in my margin flags up the way that that overworked alliteration stuck in my craw. In "Rings", a too-forced list includes "the ring of an owl's hoot as we headed home in the dark" (my italics). Eh? Can't hear that, sorry.

But that sojourn with children's poetry has done her no harm. It's liberated her  who was already, God knows, so bold and free  and given her the nerve to go for the pursuit of pure pleasure in language: sounds, rhymes and half-rhymes, clever consonances and assonances, sheer love of words, the simple saying of them, the surprise of hearing them new again. These poems are often like nursery rhymes for grownups. In "Scheherazade": "Dumb was as good as dead; / better to utter". "Abracadabra" actually gets back the old magic of your first childhood encounter with it.

As always, she is big on buzzwords; the cliché deftly, definitively subverted. So here we get "Big Ask", "The Shirt", "Politics" and "The Female Husband", full of the old Duffy breenge and swagger before its quiet (beekeeping) end.

In this collection  from the poet who's always lived so defiantly in the real here-and-now world of "feedback, static, gibberish", of extraordinary rendition and David Beckham  are Achilles, Echo, Leda and ("give him strength") Atlas, as well as such old English folk archetypes as John Barleycorn and the white horses of Wiltshire. Indeed, Englishness is satisfyingly celebrated here, albeit elegiacally: the counties, the "masterpiece elms". There's an icy new take on Chaucer's "Parlement of Foules" wherein all the named birds of the air sing their songs of devastation.

Duffy is a popular poet, with the emphasis firmly on the poetry, not the popularity. She has us listen in to the music of the quotidian, develops our litmus for lies. Even "Mrs Schofield's GCSE", a piece of old-style Duffy ventriloquism in the voice of the cloth-eared and irony-deficient English teacher whose objection to another Duffy monologue had it banned from the curriculum for glorifying violence, takes flight and asks the examinee to do the impossible, and "explain how poetry / pursues the human like the smitten moon / above the weeping, laughing earth".

 Liz Lochhead's A Choosing: Selected Poems is published by Polygon.