Any new collection of poems about school faces the steepest competition and comparison. The Ahlbergs perfected the art with Please Mrs Butler and Heard it in the Playground ; Pont themselves published a great anthology entitled The Poet's House back in the late 1990s, and so Mike Church sets himself a hard task. Some of the poems are amusing, and a whole range of school-based characters with names like 'Josh Wicks the big boy in Year six', and 'Glenys Giles, all smiles' jump off the page to make us chuckle, in a range of monologues addressed either to a long-suffering teacher or directly to the child reader. Several of the poems are however similar, using the same techniques, and the collection - 39 poems in total - lacks the variety of forms one might expect or hope for in a new anthology.Poems like 'Scaredy-Cat' are well-structured, and with a clever use of repetition deal with some of the worries of childhood and being singled out in the classroom, or in the case of 'Action Poem', the frustrations of writing inside the box! Some poems have clever use of knowledge and extended imagery. I particularly like the last poem, 'End of Term' which plays with the idea of an apple for the teacher, just right for the new Core Curriculum!The collection appears suitable for a wide age range, with some strong and difficult vocabulary, such as in 'Boys Don't Read' (perhaps they can't cope with the vocabulary), together with some easily read and easily performed poems. These may well be suitable for reading out loud in pairs, or dramatizing. Many have a comfortable narrative progression, with the occasional sting in the tail.

Even 'Wasp Attack', one of my favourites, ends in the writer's brush off, being told to 'buzz off' by the new class idol.The cover seems disappointing - a yellow ink spot, or as it turns out when we read the opening poem, a urine sample! It lacks imagination, and certainly doesn't tell you what the book is all about,although the blurb is well-placed and is accompanied by an endorsement from children's writer Alan Gibbons. The illustrations too fail to excite, neither adult-skilled or child-inspired. Indeed, the whole anthology seems to be trying too hard, with its 'Warning from the Author' and its advice on 'Performing Poetry'. And then there's the problem of the wee - and the teacher breaking wind. We can all laugh at the clown who's hit by a plank of wood, or puts his foot into the bucket of wallpaper paste. We can all chuckle at the man slipping on the banana skin. But can we, or should we, all laugh at the child who has an accident in assembly, or write about an elderly teacher in this way, even for fun? To my way of thinking that's actually taking the jokes a wee bit too far.