Pete Morgan, British poet. has died he was 71,

Pete Morgan ^[1] was a British poet, lyricist and TV documentary author and presenter.

(7 July 1939, Leigh – 5 July 2010)

Morgan's career as a poet began in the mid-1950s when he was 16 and living alone in London. He entered the British Army and rose to the rank of infantry platoon commander while serving in West Germany but began to question this career choice. By the mid-1960s he had become a pacifist and resigned his commission.

In 1964 he moved to Edinburgh, where he started to publish his poems and to perform recitals in public.

Born a Lancastrian, he returned to the North of England in 1971, though this time to Yorkshire, to live and work in the fishing village of Robin Hood's Bay.

Over the years he has emphasized the oral tradition of poetry and song. It is no surprise therefore that some of his poems have been set to music and have been recorded by such artists as Al Stewart ("My Enemies Have Sweet Voices" on the 1970 "Zero She Flies" album), The McCalmans and most recently The Levellers. (During his 1999 UK Tour, Al Stewart invited Morgan to read the lyrics as he performed the above song in the City Varieties Theatre show at Leeds on the 7th. of November).

Morgan's BBC Television series - 'A Voyage Between Two Seas', first screened in 1983, presented a journey across Northern England via the region's waterways. His subsequent TV programme 'The Grain Run', told the story of the Roman supply route from East Anglia to the Yorkshire town of Aldborough.

His most recent book of poetry was August Light ISBN 1-904614-23-X, published in 2006.

His output was slim – only five collections and a handful of pamphlets in 40 years – but Pete Morgan's poetry was admired by Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and George Mackay Brown, among others, for its sophistication, humour and poignancy. Morgan, who has died aged 71, had his first pamphlet published in 1968 by the Kevin Press. Entitled A Big Hat Or What?, its cover featured a photograph of Morgan looking smart, long-limbed and wearing said large hat.

Morgan's work was included in Faber's Poetry: Introduction series in 1971. When his first full-length collection, The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, was published in 1973, he was hailed by Edna Longley, in the Times Literary Supplement, as "a genuine original". He was also admired by musicians. Al Stewart set his poem My Enemies Have Sweet Voices to music on his 1970 album Zero She Flies. The McCalmans and the Levellers also turned his poems into songs.

Morgan was born in Leigh, Lancashire, the oldest of three children. His father, who died when Morgan was 11, had been in the army and his mother's family ran a laundry business. He attended Normanton school in Derbyshire and left at 16 to move to London, where he pinned his poems to trees on Hampstead Heath in an early attempt to find an audience.

In 1957 Morgan joined the army. He rose to the rank of infantry platoon commander of the Loyal Regiment, but by the mid-1960s had resigned his commission, having become a pacifist. Moving to Edinburgh, he began performing his poems, appearing at the Traverse theatre as part of the Edinburgh festival in 1965. At his early gigs, he read love ballads and protest pieces that matched the mood of the times, but were more nuanced than those of his contemporaries. He married Kate Smith in 1965 and they had two children, Caitlin and Martin.

In the early 1970s Morgan taught creative writing at Lumb Bank, an Arvon writing house in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, where he encouraged a young Ian McMillan, among others. McMillan later wrote of the encounter: "He was wearing a denim shirt. He was having a glass of wine and we hadn't even had our tea! On that first night the tutors read their work to us students. Pete stood by the fire. He opened his book and then didn't look at it because the poem, it seemed to me, was written on his heart."

He also became a friend of Hughes, and the pair corresponded and shared a mutual respect for each other's work. Morgan presented a series of arts programmes for BBC North as well as the 1983 series A Voyage Between Two Seas, which explored the waterway system between Leeds and Liverpool.

He continued to publish full-length collections: The Spring Collection in 1979, One Greek Alphabet in 1980, and A Winter Visitor in 1983. A Winter Visitor celebrated the Robin Hood's Bay area of North Yorkshire, where Morgan had resided since 1971, captured in these lines from the poem Gouge:

We live where ice

Gouged out an eye

Inching to its own oblivion

and after ice

came stone and rock

a premonition on the face

of what was greening into new

It was his last collection for more than two decades. After suffering a brain tumour in 1984, Morgan was unable to travel and perform. He wrote at home. He relished "a freedom not to have to write, to keep the poems in (my) head", but also regretted that he had not published more and not appeared more regularly on the poetry-reading circuit.

Morgan maintained a line in self-deprecating humour, and had a rich and sonorous voice that worked beautifully in performance.

In 2001 he collaborated with the cellist Tony Moore on Talking Cello, a programme for Radio 4 that featured a number of Morgan's poems. His final full-length collection, August Light, was published in 2005. He also wrote two plays for theatre.

A sold-out concert celebrating his 70th birthday was held at York University last year. The guests included McMillan and Duffy, who said of Morgan: "Pete's the real thing."

He is survived by Kate, Caitlin and Martin.

• Colin Peter Morgan, poet, born 7 June 1939; died 5 July 2010

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