Simon Armitage’s work is earthed – no matter what he is writing about, his poetry is never shallow-rooted. Nothing he writes is pretentious, footling or airy-fairy. Part of this stems from his reassuring Yorkshire tone – it is calming, it holds things together, it promises a degree of common sense. But in his 11th collection, however safe the hands, the subject matter is anything but reassuring. Many poems describe an endangered world. The collection opens with Last Snowman, in which a mournful grotesque floats “down an Arctic seaway” complete with red scarf, clay pipe and “a carrot for a nose/(some reported parsnip)”.

The possible parsnip momentarily amuses, but the jokes are precarious and this is partly what makes the poem powerful – its comedy thaws. The next line describes the alarming droop of the melting snowman’s mouth: “pure stroke victim”. The snowman floats on, symbol of a world we are losing, “past islands vigorous / with sunflower and bog myrtle, /singular and abominable”. A witty word upon which to end but an excuse for only the briefest smile.

The next poem is a perfect companion piece (the collection is pleasingly ordered). The Present describes a walk on a dark winter’s day on the moors but there is “no sign of the things I came here to find…” Armitage had been seeking an icicle. Once magnificent, these are now “brittle and timid and rare”. He plucks a spindly specimen to take home to his daughter. The poem is typical of the collection in that it marks a return to the conversational lyricism that is his forte. As a poet, he manages to have it both ways – he is the man in the street (or man on the moor) and the possessor of sometimes rarefied language he makes his own. Ordinary speech (such as “I was minding my own”, in Snipe) serves as ballast for the poem’s later, lyrical freedoms. The perfect last line of The Present grows effortlessly out of anecdote:

“I’d wanted to offer my daughter
a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world
being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold
at each pole, but I open my hand
and there’s nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.”

Armitage describes a world in social and economic meltdown. Poundland is a particularly brilliant poem, written with biblical turns of phrase deliberately unsuited to the high street, which reinforce, by disconcerting contrast, the tawdriness of what he describes: “Came we then to the place abovementioned, / crossed its bristled threshold through robotic glass doors.” The poem is an entertaining, unsettling and desperate emptying of an imaginative pocket – spendthrift in its way, conjuring Tiresias, Armitage’s mother and a “duty manager with face like Doncaster”. You suspect genuine research has gone into it:

“Legion were the items that came tamely to hand: / five stainless steel teaspoons, ten corn-relief plasters, / the Busy Bear pedal-bin liners fragranced with country lavender… ”

To be amusing and desolating at once is an art.

Some poems are as rich as short stories (The Empire, The Unthinkable, The Claim). Others are beguiling although less essential (I Kicked a Mushroom, A Chair, The Cinderella of Ferndale).

You cannot miss Armitage’s fascination with obsolete machinery – souvenirs of a brave old world. There are “written-off cars” in Prometheus, “vintage contraptions” in Tractors, and To-Do List includes “Dredge Coniston Water for sections of wreckage / macabre souvenirs”. And then there is A Bed (still, thankfully, a necessary item). The poem deepens with rereading – a private landscape. But even in a bed, where ordinary comfort might be hoped for, we seem to be in a room with a doomed view: “The end of the world beyond its edge.”

A Bed by Simon Armitage

Unmade, mid-morning.
A dress where it fell, where you snaked from it.
The slab of the bed sheet, marbled with creases.

These pillows washed up
along the strand-line. Plunder. Salvage?
The end of the world beyond its edge.

The patch of grass where we took down the tent,
A gift – the gift-wrap disturbed,
the present taken.

The quilt rolled back,
the wave not broken, always breaking.
The book left open, the page you were reading.

• The Unaccompanied by Simon Armitage is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99