I spoke to Brian Patten in London; the interview had been arranged in something of a rush, as he had a new book out that week and his schedule was hectic. But there we were, in a quiet room at last, and time to bring his Liverpool phase back to mind. In some ways, the phrase ‘Liverpool poet’ is a suit that doesn't fit comfortably any more in Patten's case. He seems to have outreached, but certainly not abandoned his writing about his origins and early years; quite the contrary. It becomes more and more obvious that with Patten, as with so many poets, the formative years are always there, even if their presence is a little spectral and blurred. In fact, some quite startling things came from the interview in this regard. For instance, the cultural significance of his achievements in the mid-1960s are perhaps not clear to him yet. His part in the establishment of an aesthetic and a specific imaginative nexus for the Mersey Sound and its poetry did not seem to be significant to him. He rarely thinks about the old times, and certainly doesn't look back with soft-centred nostalgia to that period of work on the Bootle Times and the beginnings of his writing with the magazine Underdog.

His objective stance became clear as the talk progressed. But Liverpool is clearly still a mental, creative landscape for him; it is perhaps emblematic of a phase of consciousness, mixing uneasily the schoolboy and the teenager, and various sorts of rebellion. In this, Patten's life is remarkably bohemian, and at times akin to Arthur Rimbaud's (one of his first poetic stylistic models) in the sense of a purposeful, almost educative drifting into experience ‘further than at home, where small experience grows’ as Shakespeare puts it.

In the interview, I struggled to keep Liverpool as the centre, as there had been so much else. But Linda Cookson's book on Patten provided some cues. He was keen to explore the early years, but reluctant to see anything there that might, in future, identify the city and the period as a British Frisco City Lights/Ginsberg relative. He has too much sanity, realism and propensity for calm reflection for such rhetoric.