IT’S hard not to like Simon Armitage Despite all the prizes, professorships and profiles in the broadsheets, his work is genuinely popular, likeable and readable, entertaining without trying to be funny and serious without being “difficult.” 

Unusually for the contemporary poetry scene, the critical praise and commercial success he enjoys is actually merited.

The publication of Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 (Faber, £14.99) confirms his reputation as the most significant British poet of his generation. The first half of the book is pretty well the same as Faber’s 2001 Selected Poems — the main difference is that the new version includes only six  poems from CloudCuckooland instead of 30. 

Armitage fans will find many of his best known and well-loved poems here like Snow Joke, It Ain’t What You Do It’s What It Does to You, Stuff,  You May Turn Over and Begin, Great Sporting Moments: The Treble, Goalkeeper with a Cigarette and Meanwhile, Somewhere in the State of Colorado.

The second half includes poems from the several collections Armitage has published this century, from Travelling Songs to In Memory of Water, extracts from his versions of Mallory, Homer, Euripides and Gawain and the Green Knight and three new poems from his forthcoming book The Unaccompanied. 

Disappointingly, Paper Aeroplane doesn’t include the long poems Out of the Blue, about the attack on the Twin Towers, or Cambodia. And there are only the briefest of extracts from the book-length sequences Xanadu, about life on a working-class estate in Rochdale, Killing Time, about the war-torn beginning of the new millennium, and Black Roses, written after the brutal murder of Sophie Lancaster in Rossendale in 2007.

“No convictions — that’s my one major fault,” Armitage writes and this selection seems to endorse that description of himself: 

“Nothing to tempt me to scream and shout, nothing/to raise Cain or make a song and dance about/A man like me could be a real handful,/steeping himself overnight in petrol,/becoming inflamed on behalf of the world,/letting his blood boil, letting his hair curl... But no cause, no cause.”

Jon Tait has plenty to shout about. A postman and union rep in Carlisle, he is the direct descendant of a notorious 17th-century reiver family from Barearse in Scotland. 

Barearse Boy (Smokestack, £7.95) is a kind of modern take on Scott’s Border Minstrelsy, following the reivers as they are forced from their rural heartlands into the industrial and post-industrial north-east of England in search of work: “Packed into the hall with red lodge banner/loud jabbering voices of angry conversations, confusion,/screeching chairs, men in black donkey jackets/with orange back panels/smoke drifting and clinging in yellow, grey and brown clouds... the union man with large sideburns/brylcreemed hair and crumpled white shirt/tucked unevenly into a baggy suit stands at the front with arms raised/as the commotion dies down and says/Wuh’ve browt yuh ahl here tuh let yuh knaa/whaat wuh knaa, lads./A short pause, expectation./Wuh knaa nowt./Back to the pickets, the Russian food parcels.’

And it’s a fine celebration of northern working-class life — pubs, pits, football and politics: “They don’t bandy about words like poverty of deprivation/when half the shaven-headed class is on free dinner chitties/for state supported chips & beans/& the knees of your black pants are slick from wear... but we’re no longer washing in a tin bath by a coal fire/or pissing in an outside brick netty/so everything must be alright then/& when some mean-faced fucker in a suit/questions your qualifications in an interview/you grab him by the tie & smash his chin off the desk/& walk out the door laughing thinking fuck it/fuck it all.”