'The Best British Poetry 2014' presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem.

Hotel Raphael, Rachael Boast’s fourth collection, charts a journey through heat, drought and pain, and describes not only the reality of chronic illness, but living with it at a time of global crisis.

Raphael is the patron saint of travellers and pilgrims, and also of healing; in the search for remedy, we pass through the balm of landscape, and brush against the worlds of artists, writers and filmmakers, whose angels broadcast to us from other rooms. We also encounter the biblical figure of Job, who poses the question of a terrible forbearance: how much suffering can we take, and what can we realistically change?

While we fight to relieve our own pain, address the planet’s ecological imbalance and make efforts, large or small, to right its shocking injustices, we must also simply find a way through. Hotel Raphael sees Boast compose an extraordinary travelling song, one that shows us how to bear our pain without trying to erase its source.

Rachael Boast's first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent - but where Sidereal's gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast's focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life's intoxicants - love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence - and sees Boast's pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things - the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there - and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.

Void Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Etudes neantes was to consist of poems written as musical etudes; these would not convey any direct message - but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This 'impossible project' has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music - but despite their esoteric nature are by no means 'difficult' in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book - one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame.

Rachael Boast's first collection is dominated by astral influence and divine chance, by unseen or remote causes; but despite its celestial title, Sidereal is full of terrestrial concerns, the traffic and chaos of the human and natural worlds. Ultimately, however, it is the work of a poet who believes that we must also turn our gaze skywards to make sense of who we are, and these poems pursue their elliptical but inevitable orbits through a world where the earthly and transcendent are thoroughly interfused. Above all, Sidereal impresses through Boast's lyric faith, which through even the worst pain and despair can still offer its clarities and revelations, and announces an important new voice in British poetry. Sidereal is winner of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2012.