Pete Morgan

He was generous to other peoples' writing, praising my own early efforts when we met at the Arvon Foundation's centre at Lumb Bank and putting my name forward as a co-reader at gigs up and down the country; I remember going with him and another young poet, Tom Callaghan, to a reading in Brentwood and Pete insisting, despite the fact that nobody had heard of Tom or I, that we had equal billing and equal time on stage.

Above all, he looked like a poet: he was tall, somehow equine, handsome in a way that suggested fragility, with eyes that appeared to look beyond you to a place where poetry could live.

He was born in Leigh in Lancashire in 1939, and joined the army as a teenager, resigning his commission in 1963. He worked in advertising but from 1969 he made his living as a writer, and mainly as a poet on the road, giving performances all over the country and abroad.

His poetic legacy is four slim volumes published between 1973 and 2005. In the first of them, The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, written mainly in Edinburgh, we see glimpses of the pop poet he was, in the manner of writers like Roger McGough and Adrian Henri in poems like Sillysuit, but there also poems with the Morgan touch of romantic poignancy, of the delicacy of love like The White Stallion with its references to the horse and the woman and the loss that's always implicit in love. The collection also contains two of his best-known poems, Yes, but is it Art? and My Enemies have Sweet Voices which was turned into a song by Al Stewart and The Waterboys in different decades; Pete was always pleased to get the little cheques, and always happy that his words had been put to music and sung all over the world.

When I first knew Pete in the mid-1970s, he lived in York with his wife and children, having moved there from Robin Hood's Bay. He was a constant figure on the poetry circuit, always at readings and workshops, working in schools and running writing courses.

He also worked on television in the North, presenting a show of new writing (impossible to imagine these days) and his second book The Spring Collection describes that poetic, public life. In The Poet's Deaths, he imagines his demise in various ways, all tied up with the constant gigging that must have taken a toll: he was poet-in-residence for two years at Loughborough University and he toured the USA and Spain giving readings and in the Poet's Deaths sequence he falls from the sky, he is skewered by passing farmworkers, he crashed his luxury car. The work is developing along with the public persona, though, and in The Spring Collection there are signposts to the supreme craftsman he was to become. Pete's third book A Winter Visitor goes back to Robin Hood's Bay in poem after poem describing that mysterious and beautiful place; by the early 1980s Pete was making TV travel programmes about canal journeys and one of them, Between the Heather and the Sea, was about Bay, as the locals call it, and some of the poems in the collection come from that show. Many of the poems in the book have a muscularity of language that reflects the harsh moorscapes and seascapes around the village. In the beautiful and tiny poem Neap Tide, he writes:

"Today the rock does not concede/To sea. The sea does not recede/From rock which worries through the weave/An elbow through a threadbare sleeve."

Pete and his family made a couple more moves in North Yorkshire, to Stillington and Beverley. Illness and a kind of perfectionism stopped Pete publishing poems for a number of years but in 2005 a triumphant volume, August Light, appeared from Arc Press.

This was a book full of poems by a poet writing at the height of his considerable powers; there were poems of nature, poems of landscape, poems of loss, poems written during a residency at a psychiatric hospital in Preston; all the poems were written with care, and love, and a knowledge of what it is to be a poet.

That's how I'll remember Pete: the care, the love, the man standing on the stage reading poems as he did last year at his 70th birthday celebration in York: the voice carrying on, hanging in the air.