The set-up and quite a few of the jokes seem to owe something to the second series of Blackadder but it's

The set-up and quite a few of the jokes seem to owe something to the second series of Blackadder, but it's no less funny for that (I laughed aloud on page 54). For young readers, particularly boys, who like a simple tale simply told, this will go down a treat. Sir Rupert and Rosie Gusset in Deadly Danger by Jeremy Strong (A & C Slack pounds 8.99) is set in an imaginary 16th century: Queen Margaret is on the throne and eager to marry the King of Sicily. The hapless Sir Rupert and his resourceful daughter Rosie are despatched to Sicily with a ludicrously flattering portrait of the Queen and 20,000 gold coins to tempt the King Naturally enough, the gold coins also tempt pirates. The simple language, the short sentences, the rapid pace, the frequent illustrations, even the cream-coloured paper on which it is printed all make this an irresistible book. It's 66 pages, but the print is so generously spaced that it can hardly be more than 5,000 words.

The prose is off the peg, the plot bog-standard SF, the characterisation minimal, the technology casually borrowed from Star Trek Yet it has charm. This is an author firmly in the driving seat with designs upon his readers.. Theresa Breslin's Starship Rescue (Barrington Stoke pounds 3.99) is a strange little book. It is a book in need of a helmsman.There's no doubting who the helmsman is in Peter Dixon's Grand Prix of Poetry (Macmillan pounds 2.99).

The book rattles along at a great and determined pace, with lots of noisy and jokey poems about a gangster called Fish Fingers, teacher spooks, and hot-shot goalies. Many of the poems are by some of the best poets currently writing for children - James Berry, Jackie Kay and Gerard Benson, for example - but the book is more of a random sampler than an anthology with a purpose. A more experienced anthologist would have done a better job.An anthology called The Word Party (Macmillan pounds 2.95), billed by the publishers as "A World Day Poetry Book', and published to celebrate World Book Day, has no credited author at all - perhaps it could not have been published at this bargain-basement price if the publisher had had to pay a name- author too. Space, Time, Rhythm and Rhyme (Faber pounds 4,99) is something slightly different, an anthology that mingles poems about the mysteries of the universe with explanatory passages in prose The book is only partly successful. The prose is clear and effective enough, but some of the poems seem less magical and - and are certainly less well crafted - than the mysteries they are supposed to be illustrating.

There is knockabout humour here, but there is also much thoughtfulness.Russell Stannard is the resident scientific populariser among authors for children, with a string of "Uncle Albert" books to his credit. In the hands of a less experienced anthologist, this book could have been raucous in mood and superficial in its view of schoolchildren. Excuses, Excuses is for an older age group, and explores as many aspects of school life as can be shoehorned into a single book: bullying; games; vengeful teachers; the glooms associated with prolonged classroom imprisonment, and so on. Both Bare Bear and other Rhymes and My Magic Anorak and other Rhymes (OUP pounds 3.99) are for very young readers, and they use words cleanly, simply and effectively. Two of them, containing poems of his own, are for very young children, and the third is a collection of poems about school called Excuses, Excuses (OUP pounds 4.99).Foster is not a magician among poets, but he is an honest and able carpenter who has the capacity to fashion good poems to order for almost any age group. John Foster, formerly a headteacher, is an extremely able anthologist and poet for children with dozens of books to his credit - published, for the most part, by the Oxford University Press Three new books by him have recently appeared.

McGough is enormously alive to the potential playfulness of words, and this is the creative impulse that drives this book along - the thought that, when words are thrown together at a party, magically explosive and unpredictable things do tend to happen. In this book, poems come to life as if they were mesmerising spells, jack-in-the-boxes or card tricks performed by some master conjuror. No matter whom they happen to be written by, whether it be a Dinka tribesman, that son of a word-shy farmer, Seamus Heaney, or Walter de la Mare, they seem to share some fundamental quality of lightsomeness, airiness; some capacity for unpredictable imaginative lift-off.And so to the second kind of anthologist, the resident professional. (When was a book of his last reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement?)McGough has edited a number of anthologies in the past.