Instead of the onerous first person – the “I” from which most autobiographical narratives hang – Jacob Polley entrusts his story to figures from nursery rhyme, cautionary tales and riddles. Jackself, his fourth collection and the recent, unexpected – and in every way deserving – winner of the TS Eliot prize, opens with a quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “My own heart let me have more pity on”, a line that gives the book its title: “Soul, self; come, poor Jackself”.

Polley has recruited a crowd of Jacks – Frost, Sprat, O’Lantern – and they offer a fleeting but false sense of security. As every close reader of nursery rhymes knows, unsafety is often their defining quality, the sinister never far away.

This is not a literal book – and I hesitate to distort by oversimplifying – but it would appear to be the story of two boys: Jack comes to grief when his friend, Jeremy Wren, dies and then continues to haunt him.

We are in a world furnished by frost, kidney-coloured pools, rosehips and buzzards’ wings. Home is Lamanby – an ancient Cumberland place name. There is an eerie quality about the landscape that makes one consider what people amount to without possessions.

Polley has found a way of writing about an emotional journey cut loose from the reassurances of modern context. It is a displacement that pays dividends – as in King Lear, one feels one is encountering “the thing itself: unaccommodated” man.

Every now and then, however, schoolboy props intervene – like the sudden emptying of a pencil case – to deliberately odd effect:

“I didn’t bequeath you anything,
Wren says my rubber, my calculator, my shatterproof
ruler and my spider
in a matchbox you just took them
what were you going to do,
Jackself murmurs, spend your death
catching up on your maths homework”

One is grateful for the humour in a work that is otherwise as disturbing and driven as a force of nature. Polley is confidently mysterious – no surprise to learn he is also the author of the 2010 Somerset Maugham award-winning murder-mystery Talk of the Town.

The poems need to be read in sequence and benefit from being read aloud.

The superb opening poem, The House that Jack Built, is about wood as a timepiece. Every Creeping Thing, the second, reads like a spell Macbeth’s witches might chant, although the title is from Genesis 1:26. It introduces peculiar Jackself in his toadskin hat, standing at the threshold of the collection.

The poems have a protean power, and Jack Frost is especially arresting. Jackself has the task, like an apprentice decorator, of creating the “fractals of ice, ice / ferns and berries of ice, / onto windowpanes…” In the small hours, he gives in: “with his silvery head / in his hands, slumped on the unspun roundabout”. The “unspun roundabout” is characteristic of Polley’s wonderful ear, the concision of “unspun” contrasting with the extended “roundabout”, the labour of decorating it uncontroversial.

But it is to Coleridge rather than to Hopkins or any nursery rhyme that Polley is most indebted. The rhythm of the last poem, Jack O’Bedlam, echoes The Ancient Mariner – with the same doomed pace and relentless momentum:

“He’s up in the lofts of Lamanby
rifling through the sun
I pick my way
from day to day
undoing what’s been done”

In this poem, Jackself is “poor”– as if Hopkins’s plea for pity is being heard. And, although it happens only discreetly at the end of this unnerving, original and moving book, as Jackself is being consigned to Lamanby’s lofts, one notices “I” – for better or worse – take over.

• Jackself by Jacob Polley is published by Picador (£9.99). To order a copy for £8.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Every Creeping Thing by Jacob Polley

By leech, by water mite
by the snail on its slick of light
by the mercury wires
of the spiders’ lyres
and the great sound-hole of the night

By the wet socket of a levered stone
by a dog-licked ice cream cone
by spores, mildew
by the green atchoo
by the yellow split pea and the bacon bone

All the doors must have their way
and every break of day its day
instead of a soul
Jackself has a coal
and the High Fireman to pay

By head-lice powder, Paraquat
snapdragon’s snap and rat-tat-tat
who’s at the door
of the door of the door
it’s Jackself in his toadskin hat