Standing on the Sidelines, By John Foster, Oxford Pounds 7.99 - 0 19 276135 8. Pounds 3.99 - 0 19 276136 6.

There’s no stranger kind of stranger than the Ace of Strange”, writes Philip Gross in a poem from his last collection for children, The All-Nite Cafe, and it’s a card that he delights in playing. His is a poetry of sharp edges, disconnections and displacement which maps out a territory of shifting identities and invites his readers to explore it with him.

The very first poem in this new book, Scratch City, is characteristically titled “Positively His Final Disappearance” and begins with a fine subversive declaration of the liberated imagination: “I bunked off. I slipped down the crack between Games and Double Maths.”

What follows is a guided tour of a cityscape in which familiar landmarks streets, offices, alleys, parks, back gardens and patches of waste ground are transformed by a delight in the play of language into a world where nothing is quite what it seems. The city is populated by recognisable types but there is also something teasingly fugitive about them as they keep slipping off into a disconcerting anonymity: “Don’t bother compiling statistics. They never keep still while you count. They live in the margin of error and die an uncertain amount”.

What Philip Gross achieves in these poems which succeed in being at the same time both engagingly playful and deeply serious is an impression of an often desolate urban life redeemed by accuracy of detail and a relish for language. A vagrant’s dog “shrugs herself down like a rug in a skip. She stretches out across the heating vent and steams her fleas”. Plate glass is “a wall-wide tank of jewel fish and pearly bubbles” on which your breath “leaves a butterfly stain”. A lonely girl ringing home from a call-box hears her mother’s voice on the answering machine “speaking slow as a hostage in the judder of a ransom video” and, in a splendidly vivid account of a ride on the dodgems, “There are sirens, a sizzling jolt, some Noddycar comes slamming, it’s all you can do with this buttery steering to miss”. The exactness, there, of “buttery steering” is typical of Gross’s linguistic grip on the actual, and is what makes Scratch City such an invigorating collection.

With his last poem, Gross signs off, combining, as throughout, the magical instant and the ordinary day-by-day perspective: “You blink; he’s gone. And real life reels on.”

There’s plenty of real life, but few surprises, in John Foster’s Standing on the Sidelines. If there is a distinction to be made between a poet writing for children and a children’s poet, then a comparison with Philip Gross might well serve to define it.

Foster is a very well-known anthologist, and any one of the poems here would fit perfectly into a thematic anthology. They are thoughtful, sympathetic, often touching on subjects such as sibling rivalry, elderly relatives, environmental concern, a parent leaving home, solidarity in the face of unjust treatment at school and so on. Most of them are written in the first person from the child’s viewpoint, and would certainly have a very direct appeal if read aloud to a junior class.

What they lack in inventiveness they make up for in immediate accessibility and could become the occasion of much helpful discussion. They do not make their own worlds, as every poem in Scratch City does, but they reflect the familiar with a decent plainness.