Bowing out

Standing on the said structure, the scouse tongue got round the "earth has not anything to show more fair" bit for the 30th time and he figured it was a mother of a way to bow out.

For two years Paul Farley had been poet in residence at The Wordworth Trust's Dove Cottage base in Grasmere, and on his last day he hit the capital at dawn to celebrate the classic verse's bicentenary.

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, travelling on the cheap, captured the view - described by Paul as a photograph in words - from the top of a stagecoach, en route to France.

"It was a valedictory moment," said the contemporary poet who had penned his own version, featuring clothes pegs on noses to counter the river's stink.

Paul is poised to start the new day job, teaching creative writing at Lancaster University.

We talk in the John O'Gaunt pub because the guy who goes for British Romanism has had a washing machine pipe burst, and subsequent house flood.

He's missing his Grasmere pad with its views over Silver Howe already.

Lakes-inspired writing will come, he says, "things just take a while to filter through, with me".

Rolling up a thin cigarette - confessing times are hard - and slowly drawing on it, he admits he could have enjoyed a pint with Wordsworth, but only from 1800 to 1808.

"After that, he became too august, too dignified and even got a proper job for a time.

The poacher turned gamekeeper."

The guy who used to write sonnets for breakfast and committed a tin of Tate and Lyle treacle to poetry, describing it as a fossil, lingering on supermarket shelves with prevailing Pot Noodles, is bemused by his success.

But not so much as his father would have been.

His late, great dad would have been "proud - and perplexed".

"He was always waiting for me to get a proper job."

One of Paul's awards was for a piece of work inspired by his window cleaner father.

"I made up a load of stuff to make it work, like how dad wrote fragments of verse in the margin of his customers' book."

It won him The Observer's Arvon Award.

Paul's first collection, The Boy from the Chemist, is Here to See You was published to widespread acclaim by Picador in 1998.

He went on to win the Forward Prize, Somerset Maughan Award and in 1999 was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

His second volume, The Ice Age, was this summer's Poetry Book Society choice.

Paul was brought up on a sprawling council estate on the outskirts of Liverpool.

Looking one way he saw the city, the other green fields, farms and trees.

Art dominated secondary school.

He thinks a love of sea shanties as a boy got him into appreciating a rhythm of words.

"There was no road to Damascus for me.

I did some writing in my teens, but it was to do with my hormones."

When he went to Chelsea School of Art he moved from the country's poorest area to its richest.

"L27 to SW3 in a single day," he laughs.

" It would have been easy at college to have a chip about my background and rail against it.

I didn't.

I got on with loving London.

It was a thrill, every day an eye-opener."

He stayed 13 years in the metropolis, pulling out of his little studio when he could stand the smell of turpentine and linseed oil not a second longer.

"I fell out of love with painting and went to night school to do writing," he explains as if it was as simple as changing a light bulb.

His talent was soon recognised.

"I always have tons and tons of stuff to write about.

Graham Greene called it the image bank.

It never gets overdrawn and never runs out."

Publishing his first collection in 1998 was like having a baby.

"It's as close as a bloke can come to giving birth.

I felt like I was on birth row."

He admits people turn to poetry at momentous times, like Diana's death and 9/11.

Ironically he had just read A Minute's Silence at a school assembly on September 11 last year.

As the horror and tragedy of the twin towers started to filter through, Paul was asked to stay on in school and recite the poem again.

Personally he doesn't and could never write for commendation.

"I'm not after prizes or awards.

I write because I want to write the best possible poem I can."