Zoom! is the book which launched Simon Armitage's meteoric rise to poetic stardom. Unusually for a first collection, Zoom! was picked as a Poetry Book Society Choice as well as being shortlisted for a Whitbread Poetry Award (forerunner of the Costa Book Awards) in 1989. Written at a time when he was still working as a probation officer, it established Armitage as one of the most distinctive new voices in British poetry. Exactly thirty years later he was appointed UK Poet Laureate.