ANTONY Dunn had a dream. In it he was writing a poem, quickly complete, poetry in motion: the stuff of dreams for a creative writer.

"Of course by the time I woke up it was all gone... except for the title. I remembered that. Flea Circus," says the York poet. "That hung around in my head for a couple of days and from that start it's now become probably the best thing I've ever written."

By Antony's calculation, you may have to wait until 2005 to see it in print in his next collection but already he has chosen Flea Circus, provisionally at least, as his next book's title. In the meantime, he has his second collection to promote with the launch of Flying Fish at Waterstone's in York.

Antony, 28-year-old marketing officer for Riding Lights Theatre Company, became the youngest name on the prestigious Oxford Poets list when his first collection, Pilots And Navigators, was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. Such is his rising status that last Saturday both the Guardian's The Guide and the Independent's Information listings magazines saw fit to look beyond London to include the Flying Fish launch in its literary highlights for the week ahead.

Not that he craves celebrity, even if his sideburns, earrings, handsome features and slim frame in a T-shirt give him a zeitgeist look. The book does not include a photograph. "I chase publication of everything I write, and my history bears that out, but I'm not kidding myself that I'll ever be well known. This is poetry!" he says.

First and foremost, Antony writes for himself, but this it is no selfish indulgence. "Like most poets I don't write for an audience but I'm jolly grateful if there is one.

"I write poems because I want to explore something. I never set out specifically to say something. The poems are always a journey of discovery and the ones that end up being completed and published are the ones that surprise me and show me something I didn't know I knew or thought," he says.

Antony likes his work to be "re-readable", not too simple but not impenetrable either. "I want people to read a poem once and gain something from it, then read it again and gain something else. You don't want it to be so obscure that they don't ever look at it again but you don't want it to be so obvious that it has the same effect."

"One of the things that people find difficult to accept is that poetry is difficult: difficult to read, difficult to write. People feel poetry is something they all have at their fingertips; it's perceived as a way of venting your emotions but that's not what it's good at. Just as sticking lines of similar length together is considered to be poetry and easy to do, but it's only easy to write bad poetry."

To prove the point, Antony says he is experiencing the equivalent of rock music's infamous "difficult third album". "What happens is, you write loads and loads of material for the first collection and in the second one the same themes appear but more efficiently - although I still stand by 80 per cent of that first book. For the third one, I'd like to broaden my view and look outside of me more. The challenge now is to find other things going on in the world."

In Flying Fish, his poems glimpse the "other life of things caught out of their own element", such as flying fish. "We know so little about them and the only time we see them is when they're somewhere they can't survive. That was the starting point and it's turned into a book about people being transformed by experiences they shouldn't by right survive," Antony says.

Poets are often perceived as outsiders, as fish out of water. Not so, insists Antony: "The average person's opinion of a poet is very low. Poets are probably still seen as white middle-aged men who are essentially not in touch with the real world but you can't generalise about poets. Of all the art forms it's the one everyone wants to do: 99 per cent of the population must have written a poem at some time. So that's what poets are like: they're like everyone."

Flying Fish is published by Carcanet Oxford Poets in paperback at £6.95

Updated: 09:32 Wednesday, March 20, 2002