Roger McGough was one of the Liverpool Poets who, with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, spearheaded the Sixties revolution in verse.

They concentrated on the simple, streetwise and immediately affecting.

Now, after almost 40 years of touring, he has developed a soft, gravelly drawl which makes reading a list of the Mersey's dockyards sound like poetry.

Stepping on stage in a tight, black suit over a striking, red Hawaiian shirt, with his white hair scraped back into a ponytail and a funny little pencil-beard, he was the very image of everyone's favourite English teacher.

In his latest book, Everyday Eclipses, McGough gives freer rein to the darker side of his work with the traditional themes of his dockyard childhood and frustrated love complemented by new reflections on fatherhood.

For the first half of the hour-long performance, he focused on the surreal side of his muse, notably bad cats, celebrity, bees and telling the proto-Jimi Hendrix to ditch the banjo and try using a guitar.

Each verse lasted less than a minute but the imagery McGough conjoured lingered through the applause: A ginger tom-cat preying on birds from a garden wall is a "marmalade sphinx".

In the second half of the performance, the atmosphere changed.

Instead of laughter and polite applause, silences followed the conclusion of each reading:

A couple driving out to Boston's Logan Airport to hop on a short-haul flight on September 11.

An elderly father taking his young daughter to a pantomime, regretting he will never see her grow up.

A close friend's death.

Through every emotion, McGough's gentle Liverpudlian voice polished each word.