The bookies down the road from me weren't taking bets on who would win the TS Eliot Prize (as famous literary awards go, the Eliot is still, sadly, only the little sister of the Man Booker). But for months now, the smart money's been on Sinéad Morrissey.

Though there had been murmurings about Anne Carson's epic verse novel Red Doc> and Helen Mort's confident first collection full of ghosts and political resonances, Morrissey had the best form. Three of the four previous books by the Northern Irish poet have been shortlisted (in 2002, 2005 and 2009), and, for months now, this has felt like her year. In July 2013, the month her triumphant fifth collection, Parallax, was published by Carcanet, Morrissey was made Belfast's first poet laureate. Alongside Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead (Scotland) and Gillian Clarke (Wales), she completes a quartet of poet laureates in the British Isles who are women.

Parallax is an ambitious and complex collection, which takes as its broad theme the distance between what we see and how things really are.

The most confident exploration of that idea comes in 'Fur', a poem in response to Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors:
'Too obvious a touch / to set the white skull straight. [space] Better / to paint it as something other'. The optical illusion of the painting's stretched-out skull is mirrored in the poem's spaced-out formatting, as Morrissey takes a tilted view of death.

Structurally, the poems are beautiful: riddled with subterranean passageways and false doors, they're easy places to lose your intellectual footing. Last Winter' begins by wrapping you in an alliterative circle ('Last Winter / was not like last winter, we said, when winter / had ground its iron teeth in earnest') and then chucks you out, spinning, into a kaleidoscope of long-past seasons. By the final four lines, a sudden recollection of a wedding day, you are just as disoriented as the poem's overwhelmed bride and groom.

There's familiarity, too. 'The High Window' opens like a letter but addresses you as 'Honey', right off the bat, while the first stanza of 'The House of Osiris in the Field of Reeds' could be a diary entry from a parallel universe Bridget Jones:

I'm turning forty. Not on my birthday
(still, as I write, six weeks away) but over months.

Last year, Sharon Olds won for her savagely emotional poems. This year's judges have seen fit to reward a writer who combines intellectual ambition with intricate engineering, and with this kind of recognition, Morrissey finally feels like one of the country's leading poets.