Adrian Henri

THE poet Adrian Henri died on a Wednesday. He was really a weekend man. The day before, he was granted the freedom of the city of Liverpool. He loved that, having been born in Birkenhead, which he often and ostentatiously described as ''across the water''. His father was a dancing instructor and his mother was ''simply there to be adored''. There was a Mauritius background to the Henri household that genuinely believed Adrian could walk across the Mersey.

In the mid-1960s the American poet Allan Ginsberg famously described Liverpool as ''the cultural centre of the universe''and that Henri, whom he had just met, was ''its globe''. He was right. People needed to circle the many sides of Adrian to know him. He invited the all-round embrace and responded with a hug of culture.

Raised in Wales he was, courtesy of a Labour government which he endorsed for a lifetime, educated at St Asaph Grammar School. Later he attended - ''almost enough times to be able to remember it'' - the anarchic Department of Fine Art, King's College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and graduated BA Hons in 1955. In 1959 he married Joyce Wilson; the marriage was dissolved in 1974. She died in 1986.

A teacher of great empathy, he found himself being absorbed

into the club life of Liverpool. He heard an echo from his years in Wales and so became assimilated in to what is now known as ''The Mersey Beat''. In 1961 he met Roger McGough, his junior by five years, and later the even younger Brian Patten (by 15 years). They read the new song lines in pubs, dungeons, and even The Cavern. In 1967 Tony Richardson of Penguin lifted them in the prestigious series of Penguin Modern Poets. It sold more than

a million copies. Even Ginsberg was awed. Henri's poems were suffused with mock-melancholy, though maybe it was not always so mock as self-questioning. His delivery in performance invited the listener to beware of false conceits. The most quoted poem is Love Is . . . The dots tell almost all. This is a poem to lead you astray. It opens: ''Love is feeling cold in the back of vans/Love is a fanclub with only two fans.'' It concludes: ''Love's what's there when you're away from me.''

He had more than two fans but he also knew loneliness. He was appalled by what he perceived as his failure as a painter. Yet this was a man who in 1964 won the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

Prize for Painting and in 1972 the John Moore Exhibition Prize. Scottish viewers will also remember his luminous exhibition at the Demarco Gallery in 1977.

Scotland figured large not as a horizon but ''as an alternative place'' to ''Thatcher's hell''. He joined bodies, literally, with Jeff Nuttall in a memorable performance in the old Traverse. This version of the People's Show was so packed by the pair of them that the audience watched through the windows. He was a warmly welcomed regular visitor to the Edinburgh Book Festival. In 1980 he led this writer wonderfully astray during a matinee performance of Bill Bryden's The Passion, in the Assembly Hall. He compounded the abuse on my system by dragging me on stage in a late evening poetry performance in the Assembly Rooms. Rarely has Princes Street seen such a cultural stagger reach towards such an uncultured conclusion.

That was the man. Beneath the performer was ''a shadow waiting to play with a kite''. Following

a heart attack in the early 1970s he allowed himself pause for sleep. The sensitive, loveable creature who was rapier-thin within emerged in his finest collection City Hedges (1977).

It has three parts. In Citysongs he talks of how ''torn posters flap/wind howls through rusting hustings/no fate is known for those deposed''. In Countrysongs there is a poem about Ireland where he wonders ''are there boobytraps/behind every blade of grass?'' concluding ''only the crows walk fatter along the verges''. In the centre is a long singular poem called One Year. Within are the repeated lines ''home is anywhere inside you/borrowed bedrooms/shared dreams''.

Adrian Henri embraced life. Now he enriches memory.