Motion in poetry

Roving Rory has his One Night Stanza series on BBC Radio 4; performs his songs, monologues and poetic verse around the country with his life-size step-through white horse, Eric; and is exhibiting his paintings at the Blue Minelle coffee house in Fossgate, York.

Now, Rory is the second Motion in poetry, following poet laureate Andrew Motion into print this month with Cassell & Co's publication of his first compendium of surrealist humour, Neither Is The Horse and Other Poems. In between the covers, he ponders on the role of chutney in Tantric sex, the likely conversation content of an unlikely encounter with Bob Dylan in a health food shop and the wondrous properties of Frank Worthington's left leg - and he provides the book's illustrations too.

He may not related to Andrew Motion, his real name being Andy Evans and his nom de plume a pun, but confusion has arisen nevertheless. "Some of my mum's friends have put two and two together and made five, because they knew my first name was Andrew and my stage name was Motion, so they thought I'd made it big time... which is not the case, of course!" says Rory.

Motion's orange-coated book rounds up his poetry and mini-monologues compiled since 1988. In that time this inveterate traveller - who turned 45 on November 17 - has lived in York, away from York at Totnes and Llanfyllin and now near York at Helperby.

"It's a sort of hate/hate relationship," he says, rolling both another cigarette and a smile across his face. "York is an old lady in a chastity belt impregnable to the hot semen of European culture but, because I have so many friends and family here, it's easier to function here."

Yet he has no qualms about moving on when the mood takes him. "I only need my guitar, pen and paper, and my roll-ups. Just a car full of possessions," he says.

Rory fits the classic artist profile of the outsider, a status fostered when he took a year out between finishing at Tadcaster Grammar School in 1974 and going to Bristol University and ended up hitchhiking to Afghanistan.

"It just made me look at England in a whole new way, and it meant that my economics, philosophy and sociology course looked uninteresting, so I only went for a term," he says.

By 21, Rory was working on the oil rigs off Aberdeen, and he travelled non-stop until he was 30, teaching English in Greece, planting trees in Scotland and living in the Dordogne for three years, where he still owns half an acre on a hill side, acquired at auction for £100.

"At 29, I was living in this superior hut in the Dordogne; it was mainly summertime, the living was often easy and I'd reached some sort of hippie paradise there," he says. Nevertheless, he regularly got on his bike to busk in France and Spain with his primitive guitar playing and stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

Returning to England, Rory set himself up on the Enterprise Allowance scheme as a singer-songwriter, performing his "spiels" in pubs. BBC Radio York offered him a weekly slot for his comic thoughts. "By the end of the year, I'd got all this material together from the pressure of having to produce something for the radio every week," he says.

Works from those days, such as The Yorkshire Song and Lonesome Frozen Turkey, appear in the compendium and are early evidence of Rory's love of punning. Indeed his fusillade of puns - a sort of 21-pun salute - rivals John Hegley. "I love the sheer daftness of them," he says. "You know how in France when you have a big meal they'll bring you a little glac as a palate refresher; puns are like that glac. Nothing but puns would drive me mad but as part of a balanced diet they're absolutely fine."

His writing, he says, is rooted in a tug of war between reality and romance: "That's always the bedrock of comedy, and with me it's the Yorkshire lad versus the cosmic seeker." In other words, Rory in perpetual Motion.

Rory Motion launches Neither Is The Horse and Other Poems - published by Cassell & Co at £6.99 in hardback - in the City Screen caf bar, Coney Street, York, tonight at 8pm.