The Guardian loves Seeing Stars so much they have reviewed it not once but twice.

Simon Armitage's latest poetry collection takes wicked pleasure in the bizarre detail of ordinary lives, says Kate Kellaway

Is it a dog? Is it a horse? Or is it a poem by Simon Armitage? To say these poems resist classification is an understatement: they are wonderful, exuberant, unsettling entertainments that exist on their own terms. His voice – and its unsubdued wit – is unique. "Poodles" (a short and gruff poem, most of the pieces are longer) is about a dog convinced that he is a horse. The language at the start – "daft" and "cute" – talks one into a false sense of security: nothing world-shattering can happen with words like these around.

Paul Batchelor falls for Simon Armitage's fishy fairytales

Seeing Stars is as disorienting as its title promises, a wildly inventive mix of satire, fantasy, comedy and horror. In a series of vignettes that hover somewhere between poetry and prose, we see a young James Cameron discover that his family and friends are actually actors working for the government; we meet a man who puts on more weight the less he eats; and we hear from a Mumbai balloon seller who inadvertently sells his soul by blowing up his last balloon. Armitage changes gear and switches genre with headlong abandon, driving the reader on through an utterly unpredictable world. These are the fairytales of middle age: fantastic and cruel, they tell of small, crabbed lives confronted by surreal twists of fate. There are few happy endings. While many pieces are laugh-out-loud funny, the humour is closer to the League of Gentlemen than Alan Bennett.