81 Austerities is Riviere’s stunning first collection, published by Faber and winner of this year’s Forward Prize. When I heard the poet read at St Catharine’s College a couple of weeks ago I was amazed by the refreshingly modern, accessible and self-aware quality to these poems. The book started as a blog responding to cuts in arts funding, with poems appearing every few days. The digital origins of the poems reflect their form: pithy, glancing, non-punctuated, ephemeral.

The “austerity” of the book’s title is less a political statement than an expression of the loss of artistic authenticity. Riviere’s poems reject themselves because they are unable to exist in the contemporary age, or as Faber’s blurb puts it, the poems “analyse their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter”. Sometimes this ‘anti-poetry’ stance is explicit, as in “Loosely Spiritual American Poetry… vs. tensely materialistic british poetry… vs. poetry evocative yes but *of what*”…

Elsewhere Riviere’s concern is with representation more generally, expressing art’s essential disjunction from reality, which the best poets since Shakespeare and Spenser have always been aware of. 'Nobody Famous' describes a life constructed from photographs, where the speaker shouts: “this is me in public putting on a 2nd pair on sunglasses” and reveals that “here I am defining my personal space”, in the distinctly Facebookian sense.

Riviere is obsessed with the way we perform our lives according to pornographic norms – “guys love latina virgins in swimsuit” ('Clones') – or film scripts, such as in Fall in Love All Over Again. Such a title would be cringeworthy in an un-selfconscious poem, but here it is deliberately ironic – girlfriends are brands, her face is a “magazine”, “the pupil a blot of blackest inkjet ink” ('My Face Saw Her Magazine'). To cap it all, Riviere includes a summary of the poems in the back of the book where he mocks his whole collection with wry annotations such as “poetic bits will be highlighted in yellow”.

But here, the worth of the ironic stance itself is analysed. The summary includes the words “scepticism gets stifling”, and Riviere retains a voice beyond his poems – an awareness that poems may be “pretentious crap” ('Closer') but obviously not entirely, otherwise the poet wouldn’t keep writing them. There is creative exuberance, after all, something of the postmodern celebration that fakeness is OK, because it is the truth of the world. Some of the poems express a sad loss of authenticity, the wish to “see past the dust / and your own face” ('Coming Soon'). But not all: 'The White Door' describes a beloved woman in knowingly computer-quest-game terms, his “svelte princess of future states”, but nevertheless, the speaker’s love remains real.

The cynicism of 81 Austerities is not conclusive: Riviere says his next project will not be to continue his rejection of the poetic tradition, but to oppose the anti-poetry stance he takes here. I’m deeply excited by 81 Austerities which is symptomatic of a trend among younger contemporary poets, such as Emily Berry, whose first collection will be published in 2013, and Jon Stone, who writes ‘found poems’ from manga to express the consumerism, mass digital media and ‘hypertext’ of our age. 81 Austerities is for anyone interested in understanding art, poetry, and most importantly, our lives now.

Published by Faber and Faber, out now