"You've got to own it. You've got to say with pride 'I'm a poet." Is Billy Letford the next big thing in Scottish literature?

"I was in the Fubar in Stirling," he says, referring to Stirling's most (in)famous nightclub, "and I decided I was going to tell people I was a poet, right? I remember making the decision. 'I'm just going to tell people I'm a poet.'

"I was speaking to this lassie and she said, 'What do you do?' And I thought, 'Here's the moment'. And I leant forward and whispered in her ear, 'I'm a poet.' And she went, 'What?' I said, 'I'm a poet.'' And she said, 'Oh, God bless ye,' and she touched me on the shoulder and walked away. It's no a sexy thing. It really isn't."

He pauses for a moment "Although I did meet my wife at a poetry reading."

William (aka Billy) Letford is 39, handsome, married (to Abi who's from Cambridge and whom he followed to Winchester where she works).

He's also very possibly, very probably, the next big thing in Scottish literature.

In saying so, I feel I'm being quite restrained. Liz Lochhead, a huge fan, has said his work is as instantly recognisable as Raymond Carver's or Billy Collins's (she's also described poems from his first collection, Bevel, as "hot", so let's not commit to the "it's no a sexy thing" line just yet). And, oh yes, the Guardian's Nick Lezard has labelled him "the new Scottish genius". No pressure then.

Letford is also a marketing dream. A good-looking, magnetic, even intense, Scottish poet from Stirling with a working-class background and a working-class CV. He's a man who knows what it's like to get his hands dirty.When he published Bevel in 2012 he was quickly labelled "the roofer poet" because he was still working with his father and his uncle for their roofing business at the time.

Dirt, his second poetry collection, is just out. It's a book about sex and love and alcohol and the Ochils. It also features his septuagenarian granny smoking a joint and transgender women in Thailand.

An hour before we speak, he was reading poems from it on the opening morning of the Edinburgh Book Festival. On the page, the poems are rich and funny and smart, jumping between colloquial Scots and standard English with deceptive ease. At their best, they sing. But it's when you hear Letford recite them from memory that the words truly sing. I first saw him read in Linlithgow last February. It's still the best live performance I've seen this year.

"I found speaking poems out loud came to me quite naturally," he admits over coffee. "I didn't have to force it. I remember the first time I spoke on a stage and I was standing waiting to go on. I thought, 'I like this. Even though I'm nervous, I like this. I feel comfortable'."

Maybe that's because he has been reciting his poems for years now, from long before he became a published poet, whenever and wherever he could. When he wasn't slipping poems into unsuspecting passers-by's bags, he'd run them over in his head, then recite them to anyone who would listen.

"I was memorising them to myself and telling them to my pals. They were in my mind, getting drunk at parties, saying them over and over again. That's the way it worked."

What did your mates say when you kept telling them your poems though? "There was a progression," he concedes. "At first they were saying, 'Oh aye, that's great.' And then they were saying, 'You'll need to stop telling them when you're drunk, Billy', because I was just saying them all the time. But I was excited. I was excited and wanted to do it."

Letford is excited now, remembering. You can hear it in his voice. The thrill-jolt of enthusiasm buzzes through him.

When did he first have the confidence to say, 'I'm a poet'?

"I had this poem called Newsflash. I wrote it early. It's in Bevel. I said it to my pal in the car. He had picked me up to take me somewhere and I seen his face. He said, 'That's brilliant man.' And when I heard that I thought … Because people tell you things but you can see it in their face. I could see it in him that he thought it was really good."

Everyone is telling him he's really good now. Well, everyone who's paying attention.

We have a funny relationship with poetry, don't we? It's both absent and present. It's such a marginal thing in the culture and yet come weddings and funerals, come the time when you want to find, say, a seductive way to write to your Valentine, we turn to poetry.

It offers a different experience to novels and movies, Letford suggests. That's its pleasure and its challenge.

"When you read a novel or something there's a narrative structure to it. It's cathartic. You create tension and then you release tension.

"Poetry – most poetry – doesn't appeal to that cathartic process. And life isn't always about that. It isn't always about pressure and release. It happens outwith that narrative structure that gets fed everywhere.

"You take a poem, look at it, digest it in the moment. Something happens inside your brain and you get a moment of pleasure or a moment of opening up. And that's it. There's no narrative structure. You're not being led through it. You have to come towards it for the meaning as well. That's important. Because you've worked to get there. Then it becomes yours."

How do people react when you say you're a poet, Billy? "Most people don't think it's a real job. The most common reaction is, 'What? You can make money from that?' You've got to understand that reaction. But I'm proud of it when I say it. You've got to own it. You've got to say with pride, 'I'm a poet.'"

And can you make a living from it? "I am making a living from it. It's a hard living but I manage to do it. And I'm just going to keep pushing for it.

"There's fear because there's nothing guaranteed but there's hardly any jobs now where you're guaranteed anything. It's no as if I'm in a different boat from anyone else."

There's a poem in Dirt called Dream, in which William Letford compares the view from his childhood home in Stirling ("clouds climb over the Ochil Hills") to the one he has now in Winchester where he lives with his wife Abi ("one tree filling the glass"). His poetry is a window on his experience, good and bad. In the pages of Dirt you will find a poem ("Curry") about terrible diarrhoea in Mumbai ("It wasn't just a bad curry, it was the worst curry you've had in your whole life"). At the book festival he'd decided to read Temple, despite its 18-rated language, which was inspired by an unsuspecting visit he made with Abi to a transgender brothel in Thailand.

"It's the same as if you're in Amsterdam, you'll go and look at the red light district. It's a sort of tourist thing. We came to this bar. Frosted windows, cosy. So we just went in there.

"We realised it was full of transgender females. It was a brothel. We just sat down, got a drink and started talking to the people who were there.

"There's a lot in the news just now about transgender rights. You see stuff about whether they use the men's toilets or the women's toilets. People are forgetting that if you were trapped inside another person's body technology can let them out. It's the most amazing thing. To allow people to experience the life they truly should be leading. It must be the most constricting prison."

What are the restrictions placed on him, I wonder? Maybe the labels "Scottish writer" and "working-class poet". Well, that depends on the context they're used in, he says.

He doesn't mind the idea that people might call him a Scottish writer. "I would never think they were limiting me. But the reason I'm writing from a Scottish slant is because most of my life has been embedded in this Scottishness so I can't help but express it. I can't turn it off."

Does he feel he's making a political statement when he writes in Scots? "I don't see it as a political statement. I never made a political decision to write in Scots."

That said he didn't really get poetry at school and it was only when he discovered voices he recognised – Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Jim Kelman in his short stories – that there was a sense of recognition and connection. "When I saw their words on the page I thought, 'That's amazing. I can hear that voice. That's a voice that belongs to me.'

"And now I know literature happens in my grandfather's kitchen. All I need to do is translate it, transmit it. It's not a political statement. It could end up a political statement but I'm not doing it for that reason."

When Billy Letford was 12, a teacher sent a poem he'd written in response to the King's Cross disaster to the poet and broadcaster Roger McGough. McGough sent Letford a letter saying "KEEP WRITING" (yes, in capitals). Then again, he was chucked off Higher English at school and the idea of being a poet didn't really harden in him until he was around 30, he says.

Before that Letford had worked in a laminate floor store and a mobile phone shop; he'd sold "points-based" holidays ("kinda like timeshare in disguise") and pulled pints in bars.

He started going out on the roofs with his Uncle Casey ("You'll never meet a more Scottish man with an American sounding name") when he was 14 or so just for the fun of wearing a tool belt.

At the time, his father, a former pit engineer at Polmaise, was selling double glazing, but he later went to work with Casey on the roofs.

Eventually, the pair convinced Letford to leave all those retail sector jobs behind and join them in the roofing business when he was 27.

If Letford wasn't a poet in his head at this point he was writing. All the time. He'd write lines onto the eaves of the houses he was working on. His dad would even help him.

The job was great for writing, he says. "It was a privilege to be able to go to work and no have my brain totally encapsulated by what was happening. If I was at a job where you had to communicate constantly with people, that's where your focus is. A lot of times on the roof it's manual work. Sometimes it isn't. You have to concentrate. It is intricate. But if it ever came to a time where you have to lift chips or sand or cement in a wheelbarrow or lift tiles from one side of the roof to the other then it's just like going for a long walk. I was memorising my poems and holding them in my mind. Your body's working. You do physical exercise. The endorphins get released. You start to have wee positive emotions. You hold the poem in your mind. You can work on it. It was a perfect opportunity to do that."

Your dad wasn't telling you to get on with the job? "No, he was behind me, Teddy. He was really behind me so much. Of course he would use it as a joke. Part of the patter. But actually they were behind me. Whenever I wanted time off I would get to go and do stuff. I went to Lebanon to do a poetry project and I didn't have to ask for the time off. I just said, 'Dad, Casey, I'm going to Lebanon.' 'Right, no bother.' The job was there for you when you came back."

On the roofs, he says, it didn't matter if it was a good or a bad day. "If you're working on the roofs you feel it in your body when you finish a shift. You come home and you feel like you've done something.

"I had that for so long I miss it. If you have a bad day writing poetry there's nothing to show for it. You just feel like you've done nothing."

There are days, he says, when Abi will go to work and come home and he'll have achieved nothing. "It's hard to quantify. That's a process I'm going through the now."

It's that experience, of course, that makes him so attractive to so many. Even though he's not worked on the roofs for a while now – and even though he's done creative writing courses – the idea of "the roofer poet" has a charge to it. It's a marker of working-class authenticity. Does that bother him?

"I'm no ashamed of being a roofer. It's a really good job. I can never deny that. I really enjoyed it. I even think of going back to do it. Sometimes when I hear my dad going out to work I'm jealous.

"So when people are calling you 'the roofer poet' it's a good catchphrase. It gets attention.

"But then I think, 'How would I feel if I read about someone who was called 'the brickie poet' or 'the plumber poet?'

"Actually what I am is a poet, you know. And it might be catchy to have 'the roofer poet' as a title. But what I am is a poet and that's it."

Dirt by William Letford is published by Carcanet Press, £9.99.