For a writer with a reputation for being thrawn, Tom Leonard is awfully easy to talk to.

He laughs a lot too, a rich, deep, chesty cackle that not so much invites you to join him as makes it impossible not to. Now in his mid-sixties, and soon to retire from his part-time position as professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow, Leonard may walk with a stick but he retains the mental vigour and passion – and sometimes the fury – of his young self.

Regarded by many as one of Scotland’s most influential writers – a revolutionary poet who has shaken up the literary

establishment in as many ways as it’s possible for one man and a typewriter

to do – Leonard seems to have no high opinion of himself. This may be one reason why he is so approachable. That, and his innate respect for other people, which is what gives his poetry its moving but deadly edge.

In a chi-chi Glasgow coffee house near the Kelvin Bridge, Leonard reflects on his early life, when he had his first intimations of the gap between the way people spoke and the way they were meant to speak. In his substantial new collection, Outside the Narrative, which combines old and new work, there’s one particular poem, An Ayrshire Mother, which hints at the roots of his battle to have language of all sorts given its place. “tom speak proper”, it concludes.

“When I was an infant,” says Leonard, in his engaging, sing-song voice, “before I went to school, I was more or less alone with my mother at home, because my nearest brother was four years older than me. I think she actually got me to speak proper, as it were, because one of the friends I had at school used to kid me on about the first time we met, and I said something like ‘my mother’s making jelly for tea’, and he thought this sounded really posh!”

Home was Pollok. Leonard’s father was a railway engine driver,

and his mother, who was from Saltcoats, had given up her job at the dynamite factory at Ardair to marry. He had two older brothers, Eric (who is now dead) and John, and a sister, Cathie. Given his background, it’s no surprise that Leonard’s passion as a poet has been to give his home tongue its rightful place.

I tell him I am not sure what word or phrase to use to describe his phonetic work. “Me neither,” he replies. “I just call it language. When people use the work patois, I always feel they’re picking it up with tweezers.” He speaks without rancour, although one suspects he has mellowed with age.

“People have this idea that, unless you speak a language that has a vocabulary that can be validated by a dictionary, it’s not a real language at all. As for me, I just love the plasticity, viscosity, the fact that in one so-called word you can have four different vowel enunciations – to me that’s a musical instrument!”

Such as? “No, noo, naw.” He laughs with pleasure at the very feel of the words. “That’s why I called it Intimate Voices,” he continues, referring to an earlier collection. “It’s a wee subliminal reference to Sibelius’s string quartet – it’s actually Voces Intimae, but I wasnae going to call the book that. I have this very primitive belief that when people are not talking bullshit, when people are not talking agenda language, that the more they’re almost trying to move towards the sacred moment of being themselves, it gets nearer to music.”

In one form or another, music is at the heart of Leonard’s work. Throughout his poetry he displays a cadence all his own, a sweetness of rhythm sometimes at odds with the tartness or anger of his words. This love of music started when he was a teenager. “I cannae play music, I cannae read music, but ever since I was about 18 … I used to insist, for instance, on getting half an hour of Radio Three at night, just to be different from my brothers who wanted Radio Luxembourg. And I didnae even like what I heard, but I grew to like it.”

By this time

Leonard was already writing. After a childhood of devouring library books, he had an almost Damascene moment when a friend in the playground showed him a poem on an exam paper for a scholarship he’d just sat for university. The poem was The Express by Stephen Spender. He recites from it, with devotion: “After the first powerful plain manifesto. The black statement of pistons, without more fuss/But gliding like a queen she leaves the station.” He sighs. “I was just knocked out by it. From that moment that was what I wanted to write: poetry. It was a completely transforming moment …” As a result, he started to write even before he had left school.

After a few years of short-lived jobs and spells of unemployment, Leonard went to Glasgow University to study English and Scottish literature. It was at this point, in 1969, as editor of the student magazine GUM, that he wrote Six Glasgow Poems. It’s a well-known story. The printer refused to publish them, so Leonard Xeroxed them and inserted them himself. Tom McGrath asked to publish them, and they have been in print virtually ever since. In Outside the Narrative they sit alongside later work as fresh as new-laid eggs: “helluva hard tay read theez init/stull/if ye canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then/gawn/get tay fuck ootma road …”

Despite the opprobrium they evoked in some quarters, a loathing that has dogged Leonard down the decades, they were fallen upon in others. “I can remember somebody coming in and telling me that her man had the flu and he had nearly fell out of bed laughing with reading them. Which I thought was okay. He had the flu, and it’s very difficult to reach somebody!” Leonard nearly topples off his seat himself with mirth at the memory.

He soon grows deadly serious, though, as he offers what’s as close to an artistic manifesto as he’s likely to give: “The way education often works in relation to literature and poetry is that people seem to think as if literature exists for people to pour instant torrents of opinion over one another. And I don’t think that’s the way art works at all. I think art creates silence, and it’s only retrospectively looking at the silence that you can evaluate or look at what’s created the silence in you.”

One of the new poems in Outside the Narrative that Leonard is particularly pleased with is the aforementioned

An Ayrshire Mother, a tribute composed of the places and artefacts that made up his mother’s life: “ma rosary beads/ma womans guild/ ma chapel …”. The impetus to write it came from Robert Crawford, who had asked Leonard to contribute to an anthology of Scots dialect poetry.

“At first I thought, naw, I don’t know what Scots means,” says Leonard. “Then it was almost as if my mother walked into my head and said, ‘aye you can!’ With

my mother being from Ayrshire, from Saltcoats, it seemed appropriate.

“I was actually in bed with one of my sundry chest infections at the time. Och, I’m actually really pleased about that, because I feel it’s on her terms. I wrote an elegy for her when she died, 30 years ago, whenever it was … but An Ayrshire Mother is no’ about me, it’s about her. It’s just when you get all the phrases in your head, you realise how many were to do with work. That’s what gets me.”

While An Ayrshire Mother takes us right back to the start of Leonard’s life, several of the new poems are utterly contemporary. Frighteningly so. In the final lines of Three Types of Envoi, which are also the last lines in the book, he is likely to alarm his devotees:

“And though he had never been a storyteller he saw that he had been telling a/ story all his life./ It became important to him that somebody heard the story, now that he realised/ he had been telling it.

“Yet all that remained to be told was that he had been telling it./And all that remained was the need for the last understanding, the sign that/ Someone had heard the story, and the teller was no longer necessary.”

Asked if this is how he himself feels,

Leonard does not give a simple answer. Anything but. “In the book itself there’s personae, different people, different speaking voices. Personae. But – I’m speaking generally about a book – there’s maybe a residual persona, with whom the reader is in company, and it’s implicit that there’s certain beliefs, feelings. But that residual persona is not me. I have a relationship with that residual persona as a writer, and you have a relationship with that residual persona as

a reader.

“But I just get flummoxed when you as a reader turn to me and say, ‘what do you mean by that?’, because you’ve missed out the residual persona who’s in the book. He’s no’ here sitting talking to you!”

So there should be three people present at every book interview? “No, no, leave the poor persona alone!”

Shortly after, I leave the poor author

alone. As he makes his way down

the street, I find myself hoping that this teller will remain not just necessary, but that his story will be as widely and avidly listened to as lottery numbers and football results. n

Outside the Narrative, by Tom Leonard, Etruscan Books, £9.95