Brian Patten, who made his name in the 1960s as one of the most prominent Liverpool poets, has died, his agent has confirmed. He was 79.
His poetry often featured lyrical explorations of love and relationships and he also wrote books for children.
With his fellow Liverpool poets Roger McGough and Adrian Henri Patten published The Mersey Sound in 1967, which has sold more than a million copies. It has been credited as the most significant anthology of the 20th century in bringing poetry to a new audience, and is now a Penguin Classic.
Patten was born in 1946 in Bootle, a working-class neighbourhood of Liverpool. “I was one of the last children to read at my primary school,” he said in 2014. “There was quite a violent, tense background at home … such claustrophobia. I just started writing to get things down, since there was no one to speak to.”
Leaving Sefton Park secondary school at 15, he worked as a cub reporter on the Bootle Times and wrote occasional columns for the music paper the Mersey Beat. In one of his first pieces, he wrote about McGough and Henri.
At 16, he edited a magazine, underdog, which published the work of Liverpool poets and was the first home of many of the poems that would appear later in the Mersey Sound anthology.
The magazine also published Allen Ginsberg, the US beat poet who, arriving in Liverpool in May 1965, called the city “the centre of consciousness of the human universe”. Patten later said he thought Ginsberg “believed the centre of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the time”.
Patten left at 18 and lived in Paris, earning money by writing poems on pavements in coloured chalk. In the late 60s he lived in Winchester with Brian Eno while he was at art college. In later life he moved to Devon.
In 1967, aged 21, Patten published his first solo collection, Little Johnny’s Confession. His many later collections included Armada, an exploration of grief written in the wake of his mother’s death, and Love Poems, which his fellow poet Charles Causley remarked revealed a “sensibility profoundly aware of the ever-present possibility of the magical and the miraculous, as well as of the granite-hard realities”.
Patten wrote many books for children including the poetry collection Gargling With Jelly and the novel Mr Moon’s Last Case. He edited The Puffin Book of Modern Children’s Verse.
In a Guardian review of his 2000 children’s collection Juggling With Gerbils, Lindsey Fraser wrote that young readers would “love the whimsical musing” and Patten’s “airy brushes with anarchy”.
Patten was awarded the freedom of the city of Liverpool together with McGough and Henri and in 2003 was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He is survived by his wife, Linda Cookson, the author of a critical evaluation of his work published by Liverpool University Press.
“Every generation rebels against the one before”, Patten said in 2023. “It is necessary. One only hopes our best poems survive.”
