Simon Armitage's debut collection Zoom! launched his meteoric rise to poetic stardom in 1989. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award, it was a Poetry Book Society Choice. This ebook edition incorporates audio files for 18 of the poems using recordings he made for Peter Sansom in Huddersfield in 1989. The voice you hear is that of Simon Armitage, then aged 26, when he was still working as a probation officer and had just published his first book of poems.

Review comments from 1989:

'Astonishingly good for such a young writer,poems with an energy which comes directly from life now and the living language' --Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

'Armitage creates a muscular but elegant language of his own out of slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native northern England. He combines this with an easily worn erudition, plenty of nous and the benefit of unblinkered experience... to produce poems of moving originality'--Peter Reading, Sunday Times

'You couldn't mistake Simon Armitage for any other poet. He has found his voice early, and it really is his own voice; his language and rhythms drawn from the Pennine village where he lives: robust, no-nonsense and (above all) honest' --Peter Sansom