Play up and play the word game: Jamie McKendrick on two rich and racy new collections of verse from Simon Armitage

IN HIS first book, Zoom, Simon Armitage sped into the foreground of British poetry. He has now followed that success with a double release. With its 'No more mularkey, / no baloney. No more cuffuffle / or shenanigans', Zoom addressed a refreshingly wide range of subjects in a language which, if sometimes too addicted to Roget, had a zest and newness to it. Kid (Faber pounds 5.99) mixes that winning manner with more oblique and more ambitious poems.

Sport is a recurrent topic. There is a mountain-biking tour de force which puts his athletic language to proper use; the story of a pair of pickpockets for whom football matches are a chance to practise skilful hand-work; and a poem about a cricketing catch which has the wiry grace of a Carlos Williams lyric, and gives a joyful sense of the poet snatching his subject out of the air: 'he reaches / and picks it / out / of its loop / like / an apple / from a branch, / the first of the season.' Less interesting, but probably a good performance piece, is 'Great Sporting Moments: The Treble' where the poet whups his rich opponent's ass in tennis, golf and fisticuffs. Though the poem is witty and well-timed, its lack of irony makes the victory somewhat hollow.

Armitage loves to play off ready-made phrases, but this habit can let him down badly, as in:

we point and counterpoint

tread a thin line,

split hairs so finely

that we lose the thread.

It is clear that these lines describe a couple quarrelling, but the profusion of idioms is time-wasting. 'The Metaphor Now Standing at Platform 8', the worst poem in the book, takes this habit to the furthest extreme and, as Armitage confesses, its passengers 'find themselves at Shit Creek Central without a paddle'. Armitage finds synonyms as well as old one-liners irresistible ('a doddle, a cinch') and, despite his linguistic range, doesn't always write himself free of redundancies. It would be wrong to criticise these elements too fiercely, however, since some of the book's best effects also rely on them. The title poem has Robin shoving aside his caped crony in a comic-book style that is richly and typically re-inventive.

'Judge Chutney's Final Summary' takes delight in paying out idioms but, over the five pages it takes, gives itself too much rope. Only once does it show what Armitage is capable of: 'To retract / to take it / all back / would mean unpicking / every stitch / in every sentence. / God help me.' Judge Chutney's refusal here catches that 'appalling vista' - of a discredited British justice - which Lord Denning could not even bring himself to consider, in his notorious statement about the Birmingham Six. I find myself divided between praising Armitage for having hooked this fish and disappointment that he should then have let it go.

Scattered through the book are poems about a fugitive presence called Robinson, who is part-probationer and partly bred out of a figure who recurs in the works of the American poet Weldon Kees. These poems are racy and well- structured but the debt they owe to Kees, even on the level of syntax, raises questions about Armitage's intentions. Allusion? Pastiche? Homage? It's hard to tell. Still, his Robinson almost wins through to an independent life, which is a real achievement when the power of the original is taken into account.

Armitage's other new book, Xanadu (Bloodaxe pounds 5.95), described as a 'poem film', was commissioned for the current BBC series Words on Film. The book of the film of the poem has some bleak stills of the poem's subject, a tower-block estate in Rochdale. These lack the visual excitement of the film, and cold print is less hospitable than the speaking voice to lines like these:

I have to say I'd never thought

of this place as a ski resort

But moments like this are mercifully rare, and Armitage writes with wit and feeling about experiences and conditions which poetry often turns its back on, in a language which draws creatively on the demotic energies of proverbs, nursery rhymes and slang.